This is going to be the short version because I have to pack tonight, but: the banquette’s done!

I painted the whole thing – primer and two coats of the same paint that’s on all the wood trim in the house. Then installed shoe molding, and caulked the gaps where stuff didn’t quite meet perfectly.

I bought cushion foam from the guy in town who has this huge foam warehouse and will cut pieces to size for even little jobs like mine, then brought it home and wrapped it in batting so the corners aren’t quite so square:

Then I sewed the covers for the pillows – you have to make the covers around 3% smaller than the foam so the covers aren’t baggy when you sit and compress the foam, so getting the foam into the covers is kind of a wrestling match – but I defeated it eventually, and then hand-sewed the last seam. I’d considered zippers, but long zippers are expensive, and I’m not really thinking I’ll be taking these things off a lot, so the half hour it took to hand sew the last seam is something I can repeat if I need to.

Then I found three coordinating fabrics for throw pillows, and made those. And now I have a complete banquette, which looks like this:

Only now it has a table in front of it, and it’s awesome.