I’ve been working on a bench for my kitchen. I have no mud room, and in fact the entrance from the garage dumps directly into the kitchen. There was originally no place to remove coat/boots/shoes/hat/gloves, and nowhere to store them. To get to the coat closet at the front door, you have to walk through the kitchen and family room. This is highly inconvenient.
Last month I finished two coat racks, one for the front entrance and one for the kitchen. Nothing special about them except the one by the front door is tall enough to hang my bicycle helmets without them banging on the wall. They’re solid oak, and hung on the wall with concealed French cleats. They both have a shelf above the hooks.
I created a small console table for the front foyer, mostly as a place to dump keys/wallet and to hold a wooden box on the bottom shelf for my cycling caps and cycling gloves which I use daily in season.
For the kitchen, I wanted a bench I could sit on when putting boots or shoes on or removing them. I also wanted it to be roughly dining chair seat height, so it can double as kitchen table seating when I have the extension inserts in the table (which will seat 10 but I only have 4 matching chairs and don’t really want more). And I also wanted a spot to stash my winter boots in the winter and my in-house shoes (Vans slip-ons). I have a 15″x20″ polypropylene boot tray I’d like it to accommodate.
I designed the bench in SketchUp, and I’m done with the main assembly part. The legs, stretchers, rails, top frame and cove moulding are all solid red oak, dyed with TransTint mahogany brown. The stiles are solid maple, with no dye or stain. The main horizontal surfaces are stone-look porcelain with a PEI IV rating, which are supported underneath by 3/4″ plywood (plus another 3/8″ of plywood in the case of the top piece). I like using porcelain for primary contact surfaces because it’s very durable, waterproof and man-made. It’s inexpensive versus real marble or granite, and rectified porcelain tiles tend to be very accurately sized perfect rectangles. And these days you can get them in almost any size you’d like. I have a wet tile saw (actually two, a typical sliding-tray saw and a handheld with a hose feed that I use for really big tiles, say 30″x60″ and bigger like I used for my desks). But in this case, I found 15″x30″ tiles on clearance at Menards that I like for this bench. And that was the right size to hold a typical boot tray on the bottom shelf.
The picture below is from final fitment. I hadn’t attached the top to the base yet, it’s just sitting on top of the base. The tiles aren’t adhered and grouted. And I haven’t completed the finish work (no polyurethane yet, just dewaxed shellac to prevent dye and glue migration). But everything fits perfectly, it sits flat on the floor (no rocking), and it’s rock solid which was important to me since I’ll bet sitting on it daily, dropping my backpack and groceries on it, etc.
The design doesn’t include a seat back, and that’s intentional. The bench can be repurposed as a coffee table.