Dining Room Storage Wall

 It has been over 2 years since I have written here!

We have accomplished a few projects since I last wrote in August 2024, when we finished the Master Bathroom. Phase 1 & 2 are complete of our Dining/Great Rm storage wall! And another BIG project that we just finished as well, but that will be included in another post.

A couple of years ago I started scheming about the possibility of the whole south wall of our dining room be clad in cabinets, with a nice wood counter and some decorative shelves above it. We discussed what options would work best, what size cabinets, what depth counter and just how custom to make the upper shelves.

We honed in on the same cabinet manufacturer that we have used for the two kitchens we have built thus far: Forevermark Cabinetry because we find the quality is very good and the continuity with the rest of our cabinets in this house to be a good thing. I sketched up what I wanted in terms of sizes and we ordered 7 base cabinets. Here's one of the initial sketches:

Basically it would be three 24" cabinets in a row, two 36" cabinets under the window, two more 24" cabinets and then a 24" space for an office chair, with the countertop spanning over that area creating the option for a seated desk space.

This design was going to streamline everything on that wall, creating continuity, organization and more storage. We had had a hodgepodge of furniture along that wall for quite a while and I was very much looking forward to the change!

The following pic was taken right before Gabe started installing cabinets in June 2025--starting from the left side/far corner where the yellow hutch is. I was working on packing up bins of things for the temporary "move"/upgrade.

Isn't it an unsightly before picture??!?

Phase 1 would be the installation of the bank of cabinets all the way across. This includes the finishing of the walnut butcher block countertops all the way across as well (the same ones we used in the basement mud room kitchenette). Our goal for this part of the project needed to be before school starts!!!

The yellow cabinet will be moved to the location where the art with the pears and red background is currently. The glass "plant stand" will be moved elsewhere, the blue desk will be re-homed and the large white pantry cabinet was donated.

What cannot be easily perceived from the photos is the weird slant that the floor has, pitching up towards the wall. Another reason (side benefit) of installing this bank of cabinets is to correct and/or hide this un-level floor problem. For example--a pencil that was left on the blue desk would roll forward off the front edge with little to no problem at all. So what would have been a pretty straightforward install turned into a fairly detailed leveling job brought to us by Gabe.

He also cut holes for the outlets so that we can access them from inside the cabinet for charging computers and powering our paper shredder. He also removed the trim from the back wall so that the cabinets would sit flush to the vertical wall.

We chose to go with a 24" deep countertop. We really wrestled with this decision, thinking it might be too deep, but from this vantage point, I'm really glad we went with the depth we did. The kids sometimes use the countertop as a "stand up desk" :)

By mid-July, Gabe had the cabinets installed and had placed the packaged countertop on top of the cabinets so we could have more space to drop construction materials and tools. Here, he's installing the under cabinet venting so that the floor vent is fitted with an elbow inside that directs the air forward and out the bottom of the cabinet:

He's also installing toe kick board and quarter round down there.

Zoom out, by the end of July, this is what things are shaping up to look like:

The weekend of our 15th wedding anniversary, Gabe cut and dry fitted the butcher block countertops! How exciting!

I would be remiss if I didn't also include the fact that we added a family member in July--our au pair Landi! She moved in late July to help with the kids for the next school year. That would be my 7th year home schooling and I was feeling burnt out--feeling the pull to focus more on some health initiatives and we decided to get creative with it instead of putting the kids in private school. She would live in the basement guest room space until January when she had plans to get married. She ended up staying with us for quite some time after that as well!! What a blessing!

First, we unboxed the 12 foot slab of walnut butcher block:

Gabe, cutting the second slab to finish spanning the rest of the wall:

Ahhh! Would you look at that!!

Our last initiative of the summer was to finish the countertop so all of August the countertops took up quite a bit of space in the garage so I had to park outside. We decided to finish the countertops the same way we had finished all the other walnut slab and butcher block surfaces in the home: first we oil it with walnut oil. Then, give it a good coating of shellac to seal the wood. And lastly, after a good sanding, we coat it with polyurethane--matte finish, of course.

Voila! Here's Gabe installing and gluing the seams together:

And there you have it! I'm soo pleased! I was thrilled to have more storage for office & art supplies, school organization (we do homeschool, after all!), puzzles/games and books. It took a bit of time to get used to the new set up!

Not pictured is the installing of handles. I chose handles much like the ones in the adjacent kitchen just a different color. I decided to go with black (or should I say "oil rubbed bronze") for the handles for the storage wall, which will be the same as the handles on the storage at the TV cabinet on the other side of this room, in the "great room" portion (it's all connected).

Here we are enjoying our new storage/counter in the wild for Thanksgiving with family!

Featured is my (Bethany's) parents, brother & sister-in-law and Gabe's brother, too in the above pic.

The project did not get picked up again until the first of the year, 2026. We were discussing starting up Phase 2 with the open shelves. We determined that we could do a simpler version of what I initially dreamed up, since we would have Landi's help for the rest of this school year.

While I worked on sourcing the walnut shelves, Gabe got started on running electrical for the gallery lights we wanted for above the top shelf. He started by running a line off the existing circuit of the outlet on the right side of the window:

I ordered six walnut slabs at 65" long, 7 1/4" wide and 3/4" thick (plus an additional slab that was 78" long to go over the window) from Cochran's Lumber whom we had worked with before for other projects and worked out really well. I signed the invoice and we picked up the wood (unfinished) slabs in Berryville exactly a week later! The walnut totaled around $300 for all of the raw lumber. 

I took it upon myself to tape out where the various shelves/brackets would be placed so we could get a better idea where the lighting would go:

the mock-up

The six slabs under the 4 gallery lights would be the 3/4" solid walnut. There will be three 6x6" one inch L-brackets supporting each of the slabs made of raw steel, eighteen in total.

The two boxes right next to the window would be custom white open cabinets (cutting down large refrigerator panels from the cabinet manufacturer). Here's Gabe humoring me and holding it up so I can decide on the width of the custom cabinets:

We decided on 15" wide to fit a bamboo caddy sitting on the counter I already had, lol. It also worked well with the size of the walnut slabs we ordered, fitting snugly into the space from the open cabinets all the way to the walls on either side it would die into.

He started in on cutting the holes for the electrical boxes for the lights on a nice snowy day:

The walnut slab bundles can be seen in the pic on the floor, tucked in next to the toe kicks.

Our son Judah, helping out:

And we have light!!

Working on the other side:

Installing the brackets and getting a good idea of how much light they will block of the lower portion:

Lights off, with the slabs dry fit and un-cut:

Lights on!

As you might be able to detect, there is only one hole to patch on the drywall, not two. I thought it was particularly amazing how Gabe worked it out to connect/switch the lights from both sides together wirelessly! (Gabe explain, with links). This was accomplished by right at the end of January.

Onward to finishing the walnut slabs! Finished about 2 months later:

The garage was co-opted for a couple weeks with this project, of course. We took the opportunity to finish some other walnut shelves needing to be installed somewhere else (the live edge ones in the pics).

In April, Gabe was finalizing the custom cabinets and securing the walnut slabs in place on the brackets:

...keeping the shelf height of the custom cabinets the same height as the walnut all the way across.

And I'm itching to start placing decorative items!! Even though it hasn't been painted (touched up) yet.

Securing everything in place:

Gussied up at the end of the school year! This is how it looks for most of the year.

Here's a detail shot of the shelf over the window:

The shelf is unfinished because it is part of "Phase 3". My idea with this is to hang acrylic shelves over the window (placed right where the window mullions fall) and place plants and colored glass decor on it, so it gets the lovely light!! It will take some doing, so I'm going to do some more research and come back to this at a later time. It will require some customization!

This fall, I took some real "after" pics to do a comparison.

Before:

right after we finished the addition, in 2018

After!

There are 8 years between these pics.

Before:

After!

Before & After:

One last before & after--the "before" is from 2023 here (Allie is 2):

A couple more detail shots:

view from kitchen entry

view of the office area

bank of cabinets

from the east wall

detail shots

I have to say, it was so much fun populating our new open shelves!

All for now! 😘

Walnut slab countertop and bar top!!

Sound the alarm, the countertop and bar top are finished!!

There were so many painstaking steps involved in getting them finished!

Here is the tale of our two walnut slabs.

Back in March 2018, we selected slabs from my parents stash.  They have a lot of walnut trees on their property, and one such tree was pretty close to the house, getting so big, dropping walnuts on their driveway.  One day, they had a guy come to remove the tree, limb from limb.  The guy accidentally drops part of the tree trunk on my mom's vehicle!  It was totaled.

But it was time for a new car anyway, so it worked out!  Anyways, my parents proceeded to have of some the tree cut into slabs, and they are sitting under a tarp next to their driveway.  They were generous to let us have what we wanted from the pile.

So, here's what we selected!

By mid-May, we received the slabs back from Cochran's lumber, after having been kiln dried.

We had fun imagining what they would be like all finished up:

By June, we had a local guy, a church friend of my dad's, join together two bookmatch slabs for the one countertop slab with biscuit joints.  Here it is waiting for the next step:

It is too narrow on it's own for the standard countertop width, so Gabe comes up with a plan to join a scrap to the back to make it wider.

By mid-July, he's here gluing and screwing the pieces together:

Another dry fit after trimming down the ends a little:

The next big task is to do a better planing job.  After selecting the slabs, we had them planed down, roughly, but then we got them kiln dried after, which we should have done first.  Who is to know if we would have needed to plane them down after this step, I don't know, but we saw how warped they were after kiln drying and knew we had made a mis-step.

At this point, Gabe made a special jig to make the pieces flat and down to the thickness we wanted.  My morale was low at this point, thinking we will never get these things done!  But Gabe stuck to his guns, and really did a good job.

Here he is with a router, planing down with the special jig he made:

And here's a link to a video of the process too, if that helps you understand what is going on better.

After this, it had a lot of little grooves in it that needed to be sanded out.  But it was much more flat after this process!  And more the thickness we wanted.

Check it out!  Still a dry fit.

The same thing was done to the bar top, which happened to be a lot more warped, with a lot more knots and movement in it.  No pics of that one, sorry.

The next undertaking is to fill in the knots and cracks with epoxy.  We chose a black epoxy, in keeping with the black filler that was in our hardwood floor cracks and knots.

Somehow this next part of the process would take all of August...with letting the product set, it ended up needing a good number of coats--it just kept settling deeper in the cracks and knots!

Once again, my morale was low.  It looks so ugly until you after you sand and oil it up!

Is it the final trim and sanding job yet?

Nope.

Pic taken first day of September

And now, Gabe preps the pony wall for the brackets that will hold the bar top.

Also, we must come up with a plan for the "trim" piece that will sit on top of the pony wall that returns back into the wall, creating the peninsula.  My parents had some really old walnut scraps that had already dried out enough that Gabe glued together and sanded up nice to get to the thickness of the bar top, since it would be joined together with it at a 90 degree angle:

By this time, it's mid-September and speed is picking up a little on progress.  Gabe works next on two butterfly joints that will ensure that cracks will not advance:

I'm pretty sure this is the kind of thing that Gabe really loves to do.  Wood working.

Ok, slabs are set in place with edges are all cut to size and sanded a final time:

Still a dry fit, mind you.  But boy howdy, if they are this gorgeous before oiling, how are they going to look after???

We are going to find out...

(me oiling video link--btw it's long)

Does not disappoint!

Still a dry fit.  It still needs to be polyurethaned, silly!

Don't mind me, just admiring the lovely oiled wood in the evening light...

And now for a session in "lessons learned".  So.  I had done some research, reading Bob Flexner's Understanding Wood Finishing book, and concluded to apply walnut oil to the surface of the wood first.  Then, apply a wax-free shellac to seal the wood (wax-less to not repel a coat put on top of it).  Finally, do 3 coats (or more) of satin, fast drying polyurethane (would take a half day to a day to dry, depending on the weather, humidity, etc).  Well, somewhere along the line (probably all that time that went by from when I did the actual research to when Gabe was actually ready to apply the finishes) we cut out the shellac step.  Why, oh why.  Well, we learned our lesson in that it took about a week for one coat of polyurethane to dry!  We figure it really needed that separation between the poly and the oil, as it did not adhere well.  So, Gabe used mineral spirits on the wettest parts to remove the poly and on the rest, he sanded.  Oil again, and ready to shellac.   Another slight lesson we learned--shellac dries SO fast.  We had decided on a foam brush for application, but this was not a super good idea (you can see some of the application strokes under the poly) and switched to a regular paint brush about halfway thru.  It's not horrible, but if you look at it in the right lighting, you can see the shellac brush strokes.  Then for the three coats of poly, that dried MUCH faster than the initial time!  Sheesh.  Lesson learned.

Gabe applying polyurethane:

Countertop complete!  It is siliconed down to the cabinets this time.  Finis!

Now, on to backsplash.

As for the bar top, that took another couple of weeks to get done, because when Gabe installed the 5 brackets, he had to attach them to the studs, thus cutting into drywall to do so.  So, Gabe had to patch over the holes and mud, tape and paint them again.  Whew.

Attaching this large piece of wood took some doing, mind you.  The trim piece that extended around the corner was bouncing up a bit, so in order to get it lay flat, he took some large lag bolts, drilled them into the drywall on the one side, lopped off the heads, drilled matching holes in the walnut on the edge, slipped the bolts into holes where he wanted them, and then he screwed the main part of the bar top to the brackets from the bottom. 

Well, glad that's done.  Voila!

A few more detailed shots:

Now, I had ordered some bar stools from Wayfair back in May.  They are still back ordered!  I thought they would surely come before we were finished.  But no.  Currently, we are told the first of the year.  We will see!  I really like them, so I think I'm going to keep on waiting.  They did give me a 20% off for the trouble, with an additional 10% off coupon towards a next purchase, so that helps.

And that's a wrap!