Way back when I was designing the kitchen, I thought it would be cool to have a banquette seat in the corner where the table is. I really like booth seats in restaurants, and my parents have a long banquette seat in their kitchen that works really well. Also, banquettes take up less space than chairs, since you don’t have to leave space to slide them back – and space is something I haven’t got a ton of in the kitchen.

So I started looking at banquette seats and how to construct them. There are lots and lots of different methods, but it’s basically making a box and attaching it to the wall/floor somehow. Of course, I decided I wanted to complicate mine by having it be L-shaped, having a drawer on one end, and a piano-hinged lid on the other side for more storage.

Once I had a pretty good design laid out, with measurements to make sure it wouldn’t narrow the traffic flow through the doors, I went to Home Depot and bought nearly $100 of wood, which a really nice guy there even cut into my required sizes (largely so it’d fit in my car, which won’t hold a piece of plywood that’s 4′ x 8′. Here’s my car with a lot of wood in it:

Oh yeah – I bought a new car in February, and it can hold way more than my previous car. It’s awesome.

Anyhow, I got home with all the wood, cut the first few pieces to the right lengths, and got ready to start installing them, only to realize:

If you squint, you can see that there’s an outlet on the back wall. There’s another at exactly the same height on the half-wall too, and they were both exactly at the height I wanted to attach a 2×4 as the back support for the banquette. So this stalled me out for a while, as I tried to decide what to do: move them down a few inches, trapping them behind the banquette once it was built? Hire an electrician to move them all the way to the ends of the walls where they wouldn’t be behind the banquette anymore? I hadn’t planned for this project to involve electrical. So I stopped. For… more than a month.