Making room for a modern elegant coffee bar
We recently moved into a brand new builder grade house. A white box that offers so much opportunity to make it our own. It always feels like a toss-up between truly making this home vs ‘this is brand new! Why would we tear this up??’. Well, in this case I am really glad we did, because what was a standard pantry before has now transformed into a modern and elegant coffee bar. The new focal point of the kitchen!
The difference between the before and after couldn’t be more dramatic!
The kitchen had a large inset pantry and a coat closet which didn’t really belong there with the main entrance for guests being on the other side of the house. The pantry was moved into the previous coat closet (to the right of the original pantry) and we then ripped out the old pantry, opened the framing and created space for a beautiful arched coffee bar.
Here is the design that we settled on before we got started. Warm oak wood cabinets, contrasted by a heavily veined quartzite countertop and backsplash in leather finish for extra texture. I had gone to the stone yard and selected this particular slap for its beautiful coloring and veining. They were hesitant in promising this particular slap or a particular part of the slap, but I insisted and it paid of. Sometimes it’s ok to be insistent!
The plugs are from Prado. They are a little expensive but honestly, best money spent. They fit seamlessly into the black backsplash without any visual disruption. Brass hardware is from Pepe & Carol. As for the brass sconces, I found these on FB Marketplace! As painful as it can be to communicate with people, it’s been a great resource and I have found a few gems here.
To get started with the build we had to first demo the old pantry. You can see that we started by building out that coat closet into a pantry to move all the items into that space. I can’t stand a cluttered kitchen, and having all pantry items out for the duration of this renovation would have driven me insane. There was enough dust as it was! Dan built the shelves for the coat closet turned pantry and we painted it all in the light beige color of the kitchen cabinets. Once that was done, we could get to the demo of the pantry. We ripped out the shelves and the door, then also cut out the dry wall around the door to expose the whole width of the pantry. Since there were supporting beams, we had to get it re-framed. This is one part we hired out. I am not a professional framer and we wanted to make sure that the roof line was sufficiently supported.
Once that was done we could go about creating the arch, wiring for electricity and fitting in the cabinets.
The other part we hired out was electricity. We needed new plugs on backsplash height for appliances to run, and I also wanted to hang wired sconces for a clean look. Our electrician friend opened up the drywall in the back to pull up the wires and installed a switch on the left inside.
We used plywood to trace out the shape of the arch. One arched piece in the back and one in the front. Then we connected them with 2x4s to have some support to hang the drywall on. The next step took quite some effort and a good number of trials and errors. I can’t remember how many times we went back to the hardware store to buy different dry wall. Covering the entire front in drywall was the easy part. Covering in sides wasn’t that bad, either. The tricky part was adding drywall to the inside of the arch. What ended up working best was using 1/4” dry wall, pouring hot water over it and once soaked slowly molding it over the arch form. We tried 1/2” drywall before and ended up with a nice crack in the middle. So definitely use 1/4” if you’re going to bend it! We screwed the drywall into the supporting 2x4s we put in the inside of the arch.
It looks like the end is near, but this is where the really messy part started - mudding and skimming. It’s my least favorite things to do - it’s hard on my wrist, it takes forever and it’s really messy. I’ve mudded a lot of walls in our house before, mostly to smooth out the terrible orange peel texture that we have on all of our walls. So here I go again mudding and smoothing out the drywall to bring it to a smooth wall. Since this modern coffee bar is sitting in the middle of a wall that is textured, we decided that the easiest thing to do is to reapply texture to the front of the arch. We left the sides and inside smooth. We didn’t pull down the new drywall all the way in the back since the bottom would be covered by the stone backsplash.
With the messy and dusty part done, we installed the cabinets. To make life a little easier and this project faster, we bought two cabinets that happened to be the perfect size to fit into our nook and replaced the front. Dan shimmied them into the space and leveled them out and with the drywall and the cabinets in place, we could get the stone guys in to take measurements for the countertop and the backsplash.
This was the more rewarding phase of the project, where things started to come together visually. The groundwork for the modern elegant coffee bar was set, and now we could build it out. The countertop came in, and we went to building out the cabinet and building matching floating shelves before the stone guys came back to measure for the backsplash.
For the cabinet fronts, we entirely replaced the drawer fronts. We cut them to size in solid oak and gave them a warm light stain and a few layers of polyurethane to seal it in. The face frame got a good amount of veneer to cover up the white. We also attached new baseboard, also covered in veneer. I was excited to add the brass finish, installing the sconces and attaching the hard ware. Fun fact, in our household, I am the one who touches anything that has remotely to do with electricity! Dan had an accident as a kid chomping on an electric cable and understandably he has since decided to not touch any wires anymore. But with the connections all installed, luckily the installation part wasn’t that difficult.
We built two layers of oak shelves which are attached to the wall using hidden brackets for a minimalist and clean look. We propped them up on 2x4s here to see what height we wanted them to be in and to make sure that they actually fit into the space. It was a tight squeeze! With the shelves in place, the backsplash could be measured out. It took a little extra time to measure out where exactly the plugs will go, but totally worth it. They look so sleek!
Overall it took about four weeks with a few stop and gos along the way. Here are the things that made this project a little more complex:
Finding a framer was a little harder than we anticipated and Dan ended up driving around the neighborhood looking for houses that were under construction and speaking to the workers on the construction site
We learned the hard way that you need 1/4” thick drywall to create an arch. Anything thicker will break when trying to achieve this radius
Wood stain shows slight variety between hardwood planks and hardwood vinyl
It was a good thing we started with electricity. Having the light fixtures determined ahead of time helped know where to position and where to drill holes and pull electricity through to
Drywall cutting, drywall installation and drywall mudding are all super dusty. We should have built the little tent a little earlier to avoid the find dust getting pretty much everywhere in the kitchen
We had to move the thermostat and the doorbell. We learned the hard way that you should always switch off the A/C first before disconnecting the thermostat as otherwise you may need to reset the fuse.
It was a long labor of love but we couldn’t love this project more. Hard to imagine that this wasn’t always there!