DIY Built-In Dining Room Seating

Hello Friends - Happy Canadian Thanksgiving to all of my fellow Canadians, I hope it was a lovely weekend for you! We personally stuck around home and had a pretty low key weekend. We had Glen’s Mom over on Sunday night and my Sister-In-Law and Brother over on Saturday night. But we mostly spent our time completing our new DIY Built-In Dining Room Seating!

Obviously this is a pretty particular project as the dimensions were specific to our space, but I will try to give you as much detail as possible so you can achieve the same look in yours!

This blog will look a bit different as I wont be giving you a step-by-step and I wont be giving you cuts as every space is different, so it wasn’t worth it on my end to blog the entire process. But I will be blogging how we built this built-in dining room seating and how you can easily do it too!

Our Seating is 60″ Deep and 79″ in Length across the back window.

Shop List and Cost For Built-In Dining Room Seating

• 15 2×3’s for framing
• 3 4x8x 3/4″ sanded Plywood
• 2 1/2 x 8′ 10 pack of primed wall casings
• Grate Vent For Baseboard Heaters 12×24″
• Gallon of Simple White Paint
• Paint Brush / Roller / Tray
• White Silicone
• Wood Filler
• Sanding Pads

The rough cost for this project was around 400.00, which is pretty good as you can’t even find two decent quality chairs for that! Instead of being able to just seat six, we can now seat up to twelve!

For the last thirty minutes I’ve tried to add my cellphone photos of the process to this blog and it wont allow it. So I’m going to link my three different Tiktok Videos for you to see what we did it.

Video 1

Video 2

Video 3

Video 4 - How We Added The Vent

Keep in mind, this is only part one of the dining room revamp. Refer here to see my mood board and what other changes we’re making.

If this was our home, we would of given the bench more of a built-in look. But since it’s not our home and we didn’t want to alter the walls, we built a very minimal version. We did screw the 2×3 stringers onto the wall into studs, but that is all that’s attached to the wall. The majority of the weight will sit on the feet/posts that you see.

We also cut out slots in the two far panels for vents so our baseboard heat could vent. We don’t often use that heater and the back of the bench is completely open, but we thought we would take one extra precaution since this isn’t our home.

It honestly looks pretty dang good.

You actually can’t see through the vent normally as it’s darker in the space and the table is in the way. But since I upped exposer a ton, you can see through it. The heater is on the far wall so you can see how much room is under the bench. In an ideal world, we would of made these benches into storage benches, but that would of been a lot more expensive and complicated!

Questions From You Guys..

Why did you build the bench on the rug?

We didn’t. We built the bench slightly up so we can still pull the rug out if needed. I really really love this rug from Loloi and I didn’t want to buy another because that wasn’t in the budget. The benches slightly overlap the rug and that is totally okay. When/if we ever change the rug, we can pull it out. We will just have to buy a smaller rug as we wont be able to get another back under!

Why did you build a bench over your baseboard heater?

I don’t know why, but builders in the 1970’s put things in really odd places. Like who puts a giant baseboard heater in the dining room right under the windows?! We have a heater that runs under the windows and it was the ugliest thing ever. We don’t use it often, so we decided to build built-in seater over it. There’s still a TON of room as the bench is open under and is 18″ W x 18″ H.

What Colour is your Walls/Bench?

Both in Simple White from Benjamin Moore.

How many can it seat?

Comfortably, it can seat 10. Our chairs add two more seats!

How much did it cost?

After everything was said and done, around 400.00. It might sound like a lot, but you can’t even find two decent quality dining chairs for that. So this was worth it to us!

Why don’t you make cushions?

Eventually that is the plan. I’ve looked into cheap foam and covers and the cheapest I could source them all was for around 1,100 as I would need two at 60″ and one at 43″. Keep in mind we’re from Canada, so things cost a lot more here. So I either have to learn to sew them myself or hire someone.

Why didn’t you keep them wood colored?

First off because we used plywood. Second, we wanted it to have a built-in feel. SO painting them the same colour as the wall gives it a much more high end look.

and that’s all folks! I hope you liked this project - sorry I can’t give you a play by play. But it was fairly easy, just time consuming.

Let me know if you have any additional questions in the comments!