Building a Window Seat

April 27, 2020

Who doesn’t love a window seat or any long bench that you can gather on?? I think it would be hard to find someone who doesn’t like to read a book/magazine in the warmth of the sun sitting in a window. I know that for my family the two window seats we have built have been our favorite spots to gather or lounge.

In this post I am going to break down just how we went about adding a bench to a wall in both our kitchen as well as our sons room.

For this to work in your home you will need to find a location (doesn’t necessarily need to be next to a window) where the bench will be at least 20″ wide. The reason for this is you need to be able to at least hit two studs within the wall. I will discuss this more later.

We added one of these benches in our kitchen, so we could have a better eating area for our family of 5, as well as in our oldest sons room.

To start we gathered our materials, which I have detailed below;

If you do not have the ability to cut down the large sheet of plywood, I would make sure that when you go to purchase these items you know the width and length you are planning to use. That way you can have the store rip the board down for you. We have a table saw so we ripped the boards down to 20″ wide by the full 96″ length. We made two pieces the exact same.

So, we had 2 pieces of 20″ x 96″ wide pieces of plywood. One will be the top part of the bench and the other will be what you use to attach the foam and fabric to.

In addition to having the two larger plywood boards for the top of the bench and the cushion, there is also another piece of plywood that needs to be cut. This is to create the finished look in the front of the bench.

In the below image you can see I have outlined the top portion of the leg, this is the area which you will need to get the measurement from. Our particular leg was 2.75″ tall, therefore our last piece plywood we cut down to 2.75″w x 96″ long.

Once you have all the boards cut to the sizes you need, you can start to assemble the bench. First, you want to measure out where the legs are going to fall on your bench. We are using a total of 4 legs for our benches, so we made sure to space them evenly across the board. We also made sure to place them at the very edge of the board.

We then attached each leg to the plywood, we made the mistake of not putting the boards on saw horses, so make sure you have the plywood resting on the saw horses prior to doing all your measurements, otherwise you’ll have to move it to screw it all in.

To attach each of the legs we used 3″ screws and put 3 in each leg. Prior to screwing in the screws it is highly recommended that you use a drill bit to pre-drill a hole. That way the 3″ screw will go into the leg easier, and not cause any damage to the piece.

Once all the legs are attached to the plywood, you are then going to want to add the back supports for the finished front piece. This is where you will use the 2x2x8 boards. You will need to measure the distance between the legs and then cut the boards accordingly.

When placing the boards on to the plywood, you want to make sure that the support pieces leave enough room for the face piece to fit. In the below image you can see that the boards are set back about 3/4″. Once these were in place we attached them using 1 5/8″ screws.

Now that the support boards were all in place, we then measured the length each of the face boards needed to be. These were the strips of plywood that measured the same width as the top of the legs.

Below you can each one in its place, and how it gives that finished touch to the bench. We attached these boards using our finish nailer, and use 1.25″ nails.

Now that the bench was completely built, it was time to paint it. I took it into our backyard and sprayed it with our paint sprayer. I just found spraying it easier than hand painting it, but either way would work!

While it was drying we took the 2x3x8 and attached it to the wall, this creates a support brace for the back part of the bench to sit on. The brace should be the same height off the floor as the bench is off the ground. We located the studs in the wall, which are typically 16″ on center, and then used the same 3″ screws to hold the board in place. The picture below shows the board attached under the bench, unfortunately I forgot to snap an in-progress photo.

Now that the 2×3 was attached, we brought the bench in and sat it ontop. Here you can see the bench in its final place, this is the one located in our kitchen.

Now that the bench was complete I needed to get the cushion on, I actually used an old memory foam topper that we no longer used and cut it to size, but the high density foam listed above would work too.

I just laid out my fabric, I used a white linen, first, then I laid the foam topper down and lastly the piece of plywood on top of that. I just slowly worked around the piece stapling the fabric into place.

Once that is done, the bench is complete! Here is a final look at how our bench in the kitchen looked after we finished. We have had this for about 9 months now, and it has been the best thing for family dinners! We completed or sons more recently and he has loved laying on it to read!

I hope this was helpful! As always reach out if you have any questions!

xo, Ashley

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