When our house was built in 1920, breakfast nooks were somewhat of a builder’s gimmick, cute, but not that comfortable. Take a look at the ad above. Do those benches look like a place you’d like to hang out in? How about the bench to table distance? Do you see yourself leaning far over your bowl of cereal? If you’re seating more that two, what about the person that has to slide into the window side of the nook?
Our breakfast nook served as fodder for some of our most fraught marital squabbles. Kelly looked at the nook and saw potential for storage and work space. I held to my line of not altering the historical details of our old house. We both agreed that changes needed to be made. We had, after all, voted with our derrieres. Neither of us used the breakfast nook for anything other than as a repository for junk. Here is our nook, as it looks today, after some changes we made to make it more comfortable:
Those changes were made possible thanks to handy a resource called Architectural Graphics Standards. AGS, offers a set of standard measurements for everything from table height to the length of a fencing pistes. When it comes to furniture, just a half an inch can make the difference between comfort and discomfort. The main problem with our nook was that the depth of the benches were at the very minimum recommended by the AGS. So we extended the benches by a few inches:
As you can see, the cat approves.
Another problem was the size of the table in our nook. By shortening the table, we made it a lot easier to get in and out of the nook:
Of course, you can’t serve a dinner for four in the nook with such a short table, but we see it more as a place to gather and for the two of us to have breakfast (it is a breakfast nook, after all).
Kelly did a great job with the hard work of sewing pillows and cushions and painting all the trim and walls. And, yes, that is a functioning built-in ironing board on the left in the wide shot. More on that in another post.