How to Build a Banquette (Our Kitchen Banquette is Done)!

We decided to build our own banquette to get the size and style we wanted for our space and LOVE how it turned out! I’m sharing the seven steps for how to build a banquette in this post!

It’s finally done! It’s taken me WAY too long to get around to finishing up the last few details of our DIY upholstered kitchen banquette, but this baby is finally D. O. N. E. done and I’m pretty excited about it! Want to see how it turned out?

I’m totally biased but isn’t she pretty? I know you’re probably thinking that I finished this piece months ago because I’ve already shown it on the blog in my spring home tour and my Valentine’s Day fondue feast posts, but I hadn’t added the upholstery and nailheads to the bottom bench seat portion until recently – can you see the difference from this pic a few months back?:

Today I’m going to walk you through the process of making it with a DIY tutorial, including lots of detail pics in case you decide to take on the project yourself (post includes some affiliate links – see my full disclosure statement {here}). If you aren’t in the market for an upholstered banquette I totally get it if you want to bug out on this one and check back in with the blog later this week. But before you do that you might want to at least scroll on down a little and read my trick for getting the nailhead trim so straight – it’s a simple trick that would work for any nailhead project you might be thinking about and one I wish I’d known about before I started mine.

Before I jump into the tutorial, I want to make sure I give credit to Rachel Halvorson for the inspiration – the shape and style of my kitchen banquette is patterned after a piece she used (and I’m assuming had custom made) for one of her many gorgeous design projects. I decided to make a DIY version to save money and also because I have baseboard heating on my banquette wall that wraps all of the way around the corner so if I used a typical furniture piece in this spot, it would have to sit in front of the heater and be 6-8″+ away from the wall. By creating a custom piece, I was able to make my banquette the exact length I needed and also design it so that it sits flush against the wall. How did I do that? The entire back of the bench seat is supported by a cleat so the back leg that you see is just for looks and there’s no back leg on the other side to get in the way of the baseboard heater:

Umm… I guess it’s been a little too long since I took a good look under there – pardon the dust, I’ll get my maid (aka me) right on it! 🙂 Anyway, for those of you wondering about the safety of building a wood bench over baseboard heaters, ours are NOT electric and they don’t get very hot so my contractor was confident that we were fine building an open bench over top of them. Every situation is different though so check with a professional to make sure you’re ok to do something similar if you have baseboard heating to work around too. Now are you ready to see how this baby came together?

Step 1: Build the Headboard Portion of the Banquette

The banquette was made in two pieces – a headboard portion (the backrest) and a bench seat. The headboard portion was made fairly similarly to the DIY upholstered headboard in my daughter’s room – you can check out that post for tips on drawing out and cutting the headboard pattern from the plywood. The main difference with making the headboard for my banquette is that a second layer of plywood was added around the edges of the back of the headboard. This was done for a few reasons – it made the edges thicker (they would have looked kinda wimpy from the side otherwise), it gave the nailheads enough depth of wood to drive into, and it also allowed my headboard to be installed flush to the wall since the built-up edges were the same depth as the wood cleat (the horizontal wood strip) it is hung on the wall with:

One other thing to notice is that just like with my daughter’s upholstered headboard, one sheet of plywood wasn’t big enough so part of a second sheet was needed (see the line where they join about a foot or so up from the bottom?). The two pieces were glued together and stabilized with four long wood strips (the wood strips on the edges help hold it together too!). And before you get too amazed by my DIY prowess, I should make it clear that it was my contractor who cut out my tracing on the plywood because I don’t have the right tools for it so it was definitely more of a DIWYC (Do It With Your Contractor) for this portion of it!

Step 2: Add Foam to the Front of the Headboard

The next step is to add foam to the front of the headboard. I took three rolls of 2″ poly foam from Hobby Lobby, rolled them out side by side, and then carefully laid my headboard on top of them with the front of the headboard facing down: 

After tracing around the entire piece, I lifted it off the foam and then drew a second outline along the sides and the top that was 1 1/4″ inside of the one that I just drew. Then it was time to cut the foam along that second outline – I learned from my last foam experience that an electric carving knife is by far the best way to do it. It does dull your knife quite a bit so I would recommend buying an inexpensive one just for this purpose rather than using a nice one you might already have (trust me on this one – the nice electric knife that we used to carve our Thanksgiving turkeys for years bit the dust with the construction of my daughter’s headboard!). For this project, I bought {this inexpensive electric carving knife} and it worked great. Once your foam is cut, adhere it to the plywood (lined up with the outline you made 1 1/4 in from the side and top edges) with spray adhesive (I used {this exact adhesive}). Now it’s time to staple! Using a staple gun, simply go along the entire length of the side and top edges and staple the foam down just a little bit inside of the marked outline. Don’t hesitate to use a LOT of staples!

This is what it will look like when you’ve gone all of the way around (don’t staple the bottom – leave that as-is!). If your foam has a gap at all between the strips, now’s a good time to spray some adhesive in that gap and hold the foam pieces together to adhere to one another so you have a solid, smooth surface: 

Step 3: Upholster the Headboard

Now it’s on to the upholstering! Place a large piece of batting on a clean, flat surface and place the headboard (front side down) on top of it. Staple the batting to the back with a staple gun, pulling taut as you move around the headboard. Next, do the same thing with a layer of muslin, which helps create a smooth surface for your fabric layer (I bought my batting and muslin at JoAnn Fabrics). Finally, it’s time for the fabric – I wanted a fabric that could be spilled on without worry so after looking at a zillion options I went with {this Sunbrella fabric in Canvas Flax (5492)} (note: the close-up photo of the color on that site isn’t very accurate). I LOVE the linen look of it and the price is actually pretty great for a performance fabric. A standard fabric width wasn’t big enough to cover my entire headboard so I first seamed two pieces together. Then just like you did with the batting and muslim, lay the fabric on a clean, flat surface, place the headboard on top and staple the fabric a little at a time to the back, being careful not to leave any wrinkles on the front of the headboard. As you go around the top, you’ll have to cut some slits in the fabric so you have more flexibility in positioning it. The back of the headboard will look like a hot mess – but that’s ok because no one will ever see it:

Step 4: Add Nailheads

Now let’s talk nailheads – I used {these 5/8″ antique gold upholstery nails} and love them – so pretty and a great price for nailheads! What wasn’t so pretty was my first attempts at hammering in the nailheads: 

Ugh! The nails kept bending and my line of nailheads was looking all wonky. But after some trial and error, I figured out a great trick to get them lined up straight and nailed in easily without bending. It’s pretty simple – first, use a ruler and a pencil or fabric marking pen to mark out the future placement of your nailheads. Then the trick is to predrill a hole in the exact spot you want your nailhead to go, being sure to use a drill bit that’s smaller than your nails so that it’s a snug fit once they’re nailed in. For the brass nailheads that I used, a 1/16″ drill bit worked perfectly. Because it’s a really tiny bit, it breaks easily – I went through five or six of them so be sure to have a few extra on hand – an inexpensive pack of ten 1/16″ bits like {this} would be perfect. I also recommend that you drill slowly because in a few cases some of the batting wrapped around the drill bit and pilled up – the solution is to slowly pull the drill bit out, pull the pilled up batting out through the hole in the fabric, and then go at it again.

What about spacing of the nailheads? I played around with spacing options before starting and ended up going with 1 1/8″ spacing between the centers of the nailheads and a spacing of 5/8″ from the center of each nailhead to the edge. I kept this spacing all of the way around the perimeter of the headboard until I got to about a foot from the end. Then I measured things out to see how the nailheads would fall at the end if I kept going at the 1 1/8″ spacing and I adjusted the spacing of the several nailheads accordingly, making it either a little shorter or longer so the last nailhead would fall in the right spot. The small difference in spacing for those last ten or so nailheads is totally unnoticeable.

Step 5: Construct the Bench Seat

Now on to the bench seat portion… my contractor took on the construction of it but I can give you an overview of how it was done. The bench was built on a frame of 7″ tall boards on all three sides that are both nailed and glued together. The seat of the bench is a piece of plywood that sits inside this frame, resting on a cleat that runs all the way along the inside of the front of the bench (shown below) and a second cleat that is attached to the wall and runs all the way along the back of the bench. The legs were cut separately (we went through a bunch of size and shape options!) and attached to the bench with wood dowels, glue, and screws along with extra supports along the back of them where it’s not visible (shown below) – well… unless you happen to be sprawled out on the floor under it like I was 🙂 You should base the length of the legs on how high you want to sit once the cushion is on it – make sure it’s a good height for the table that you’re using with it!

Step 6: Add Upholstery and Nailheads to the Bench Seat

Once the bench seat was put together, I filled the nail holes and sanded & painted it. Then it was simply down to adding the fabric and nailheads. I wanted the fabric to have a nice finished edge all along the base, so using an iron, I made a 3/4″ fabric fold along the entire length of the fabric and then tucked and ironed 5/8″ fusible bonding web in the fold to hold it in place. You could also fold your fabric and use a sewing machine to stitch the fold in place along the length of it but I’m not even trustworthy enough to sew a very straight line so I took the easy way out with the bonding web + iron method.  To prep the base, draw a straight line all around it where you want your fabric to end (mine is 5″ from the top):

Then starting along the first side, I predrilled holes for the nailheads on both ends, lined the fabric up along the penciled line, and added the two end nailheads:

Then I filled in the nailheads in between, adjusting the spacing a bit as I got closer to the end so that the last nailhead ended in the right spot. I then continued around the long side of the bench the same way:

I used a coated thumbtack to hold the fabric taut as I went along and also used a bunch of them along the top to keep the fabric pulled tight in that direction. I was originally planning to replace the thumbtacks on top with staples once I finished and make things look a little more professional than my thumbtack hack job but I ended up deciding to leave things as-is with the thumbtacks since they aren’t visible once the cushion is in place. The last thing to notice is how I handled the corners – I just made a simple fold and tacked it down:

Step 7: Hang the Headboard on the Wall with a Cleat

The last step is to mount the headboard on the wall with a cleat. You could use a store-bought cleat like {this one} that I used to mount my daughter’s upholstered headboard or make your own wood cleat where the top of the cleat attached to wall is at an angle that fits the bottom of the wood cleat that’s attached to the headboard. In either case, be sure the cleat is mounted to wall studs so that it’s secure:

The very last thing needed was a bench seat cushion – I totally hired out for that sucker! My sewing skills are VERY limited so I wasn’t even going to attempt to make it. I chose to use foam that’s thicker and less firm than the average kitchen bench seat because I wanted this piece to be more like a sofa/kitchen bench hybrid. It really has been such a great addition to our kitchen – my girls especially love being able to lounge on it while sleepily eating breakfast before school – they wake up slowly like their mama 🙂

UPDATE: We finished off our kitchen renovation which included new flooring and a new pendant light in our eat-in area – here’s what it looks like now:

Get all the details on our kitchen eat-in area makeover in {this post}!

Hope the rest of your week is a good one!