I’ve been wanting an entryway bench for a while now, but wasn’t able to find one that I really liked at a price that Tim was willing to pay.
Some of you may have heard of Ana White’s blog. She makes plans for building all different types of furniture. Most of the plans are simple enough for regular ol’ non-builders to follow. One day, I was perusing through her site and I came across a bench that I really liked. I convinced Tim that building it would be a lot cheaper than buying me one. He agreed.
We debated staining it vs. painting it, but decided on staining because we knew that we could always paint over the stain later on if we changed our minds, but we could never go back and stain it once it was painted.
It really looked nice stained.
But after leaving it that way for a few weeks to think about, I decided I wasn’t in love with it. And I wanted to love it. The brown stain was a little too blah for me. The wall is a neutral color and the floor is a very similar wood color (to the color of the bench), so I decided that the bench needed some color on it. I wanted it to stand out more.
Pottery Barn has a very similar bench on their website that you can buy in either an antique blue or antique white. I liked them both, but was drawn more to the blue. So this picture was really the inspiration I needed to paint mine.
In my living room (which is where my entryway opens up into), I have accent colors of turquoise.
So I decided to use a lighter shade of turquoise on the bench so that the entryway would feel more cohesive with the living room. Plus that’s just a color that I’m loving right now. I settled on “Birds Egg” by Benjamin Moore. And I really like how it turned out. It seems brighter and happier to me now.
I also sanded down the edges and corners to give it a more distressed look.
And here’s a little secret…. my bench opens up to storage underneath! It’s the perfect spot for all those hats and gloves that I never seem to have a place for.
My next goal is to get (or most likely make) a hanging rack to put above the bench for coats and bags. I would also love to have some sort of cubbies above the hanging rack for the kids’ backpacks.
