Amy and I have decided on a new project for the house and I thought it would be a good one to document so here goes. We currently do not have a good place to pay bills, stash the mail, write messages, etc and we’ve been trying to come up with an easy, economical solution. After thinking about buying or building (a lot of work on my part) a secretary desk which would have to take up space in the living room, we came up with an idea for the kitchen. There is currently an unused space at the end of our kichen cabinets next to our dining table so we decided to make use of it by adding a dropped bar at sitting height (30″). The only thing this area has been used for since we moved in is to house dying plants so we’ve made double use of the term “dead” space. We plan to have a drawer above a kneespace as well as a stack of three drawers to cap off the end. It won’t be very big, only about 22″x34″ of work space, but it should be enough for what we need. As you can see from the picture we cannot make it any larger because of the nearby window.

We initially wanted to order cabinetry to match our existing kitchen, but, after checking, they no longer make our color and finish in the same door and drawer style. After determining that the new style would only look like a mistake if we used it we decided to go with a contrasting color for the new cabinetry. Our exisiting cabinets are maple with a honeywood stain and a chocolate colored glaze so using dark brown cabinets would compliment the glaze. We found we could still get our same cabinet style in cherry with a sable finish which goes nicely with our kitchen according to the sample we brought home.

The other major decision was what to do for the top. We thought about just using the same laminate we have in the rest of the kitchen, but it just seemed like the top should be different since the cabinetry will be. Amy immediately thought of a wood top so that’s what we had a the first choice. As it turns out the cabinet company had a leftover piece of solid wood countertop (made by SPEKVA in Denmark) that we can get for a deal. It is nearly the perfect size and will be just enough to make a matching backsplash. After bringing it home I believe I may have to stain it to make it blend more with our kitchen. I’m not yet sure whether I’m going to do a hard polyurethane finish or do a more natural oil finish. The oil finish is typical of solid wood kitchen tops since the finish is easily repairable when damaged. Polyurethane is more typical as a furniture finish and since this workstation is somewhere between kitchen cabinetry and a desk I just can’t make up my mind. I’m thinking polyurethane would be better for writing (the primary use of the top) since it’s a hard finish. We also plan to serve off the workstation since it’s close to the dining table so that makes me lean toward an oil finish. We’ll figure it out somehow.

In Part II I plan on using this project to demonstrate different drawing techniques from pencil and paper to 3D renderings. Taking the time to carefully determine exactly what you want to make/build can save a lot of trouble and enhance the end result. With something like this everything is fairly straightfoward, but the same principle applies to all projects.