Entry Hall Bench

Well it's only taken a year and a half but I finally have a bench in my entry hall. We don't wear shoes in our house and my entry hall was a mess of shoes! We also had to sit on the stairs to get our shoes on and off and King Daddy and I are getting old and creaky and it just wasn't working!

 I know I took a picture of just the mess but I can't find it now. If you look past the Princesses modeling their gear you can see the absolute mess of our shoes.

Here is the finished bench with our shoes neatly tucked away underneath :)

I came up with idea on my own but after participating in the Build {hers} Club post over at Sawdust and Paper Scraps I discovered I was not as brilliant as I thought. There was a post for a Traditional Outdoor Bench which had essentially the same design as mine. Instead of giving you a play by play on how I built mine I'll just give you the link to theirs (it's much more detailed anyway). So, if you go over to http://www.betteroutdoorlivingathome.com you can get the instructions here. There are a couple of differences. First, instead of slats, I just used a 1/2" piece of plywood as the top. I just screwed it to the frame and then upholstered it. Second, I added shelves.

To add the shelves I screwed these L brackets into the legs and slid a piece of painted plywood in as a shelf. Now that I see this picture I think I need to take a fine paintbrush to the "crack" where the 2x4's meet. I wondered about that while I was painting, oh well :) It's a learning process!