Adding a breakfast bar in your kitchen will make it a great place to serve quick meals and snacks for the entire family and is a great place for people to gather when you entertain.
A breakfast bar is something of a convenience in any kitchen and while they can be costly if you purchase one, you can build your own relatively inexpensively simply by using preowned or used kitchen cabinets that have been removed from a home and remnant countertop, available from any home supply store.
The best type will be the cabinets which have shelving and drawers still in place in order to gain not only some additional seating for impromptu coffee guests or breakfast, but also to garner some additional storage from the breakfast bar addition. If you want your breakfast bar to be an island, you will also need to purchase a backing material such as paneling or wallboard to camouflage the back of the cabinetry, or, if it is to be set against a wall, then those won’t be necessary. Here is how I built my own.
A local thrift store sells used cabinets, and in some cases new ones which were purchased and could not be returned. The cabinets that I purchased were a set of two, which were single and separate, each one being about 28 inches wide and 30 something inches tall. One had drawers from bottom to top while the other had a door with three shelves inside.
I also purchased twelve L shaped brackets a furring strip remnant countertop in a deep blue, about five feet long. At each end, I attacked the two cabinets to the floor using four of the L shaped brackets to hold each cabinet in place. Attached the countertop, again using smaller L shaped brackets .
Diagram of the easy to make breakfast bar we made in our kitchen for less than 200 dollars.
The shorter stools are nearly perfect for the average height counter and the cabinets at either end permit me to have a place to shove the stools in under when they are not in use.
Total cost for building this simple breakfast bar:
- 23 dollars for the stools
- 25 dollars for the cabinets
- 40 dollars for the remnant counter top (splurge for a piece of granite or marble if you want yours to look like the one pictured above!)
- 12 dollars for hardware
- 105 dollars for a perfectly beautiful breakfast bar and stools
