We’ve transformed our kitchen desk into a DIY custom walnut coffee bar! The coffee bar includes lots of cabinet storage, glass doors to store stemware, open shelves, and the perfect spot for my Breville barista express impress coffee maker.
We’ve got a YouTube vlog on the project from start to finish, showing all of the steps and how we achieved this look through a DIY.
Let’s take a look at where we started in this portion of our kitchen. As I mentioned, this was previously a built-in kitchen desk. We always knew we’d remove this and use this space in a more practical way and it was a no-brainer to build a coffee bar.
We only had 4 feet of space to work with and we wanted a mix of open shelving and closed storage. We settled on a 15″ wide cabinet with glass fronts and 30″ wide open shelving. We used the same IKEA cabinets with Semihandmade fronts as the rest of our kitchen. If you’re interested in the full design plan for our kitchen, you can check out this blog post.
We started out this project by demo’ing out the existing cabinets and soffits. We patched the drywall and are ready to install the new IKEA cabinetry. Once the counters got installed we could install the cabinets sitting on the countertop. Before we installed those, we “hacked” the IKEA boxes to line the inside with walnut veneer. We’d also use that same walnut veneer as the backsplash for the open shelving area. We finished off the open shelving with solid walnut shelves and unlacquered brass shelf brackets.
We finished all of the walnut elements by doing a light sand with 220 grit sandpaper and 2 coats of tung oil. We really like tung oil as a finish because it saturates the walnut but keeps it a very natural finish. We also used this method at the walnut shelf in our condo guest bathroom.
At the top of the open shelving area, we opted to keep a soffit to conceal the existing electrical conduit, but built it out of MDF painted to match the cabinets, so that it naturally blended into the cabinetry. We topped it off with a brass picture light.
We styled our custom walnut coffee bar with obviously our new coffee machine, the Breville Barista Express Impress, bar accessories, antiques, and plants.
