Eating nook

I always imagined the center room with a built-in booth eating nook. It felt like the right time to finally make it happen - check it out:

I couldn't find a really good photo that depicted the entire space, but to give you an idea of what it looked like before:

So I removed the table, chair, shelf, and other stuff, and got to work on building the bench frames (with Leo taking the measurements):

I used the same tongue-and-groove pine for the benches that we had used for the ceilings. We had plenty of leftover scraps, and I thought a bench would be a great application. I built the tabletop out of plywood, and attached it firmly into the wall and floor, and then I attached the oak strips around the border, and laid the tile inside.

Grouting the tile:

I cut some pieces off of a long cherry board that has been sitting around the site for a while, and sanded/stained them. One will be the front of a drawer under one bench, and the other will be an opening door for storage under the other bench:

The back of the bench is a lime plaster. You can see the drawer in this one. It extends 28" under the bench, for plenty of storage to utilize the space most efficiently.

The purple plaster is an earthen plaster, with wheat paste, straw, sand, and clay in the mix.

I took out the old window, because it was single pane and was operating improperly - and replaced it with a fixed window with a double-pane glass that I ordered from a local glass cutting company.