DIY Belart style clock and cozy kitchen snack bar — Patti and Darin’s MacGuyvered delights!

We showcased Patti and Darin’s delightful retro kitchen makeover yesterday. Today: A closer look at two ingenious features — a cute little snack or breakfast bar and a midcentury modern style boomerang clock. They made both of these for under $100 (not including the stools) — using leftover materials and just a few additional purchases.

DIY kitchen snack bar:

Patti bought the stools on ebay for $80 — they are marked Snyder Philadelphia. She had to cut the legs down to fit under the breakfast bar. She also purchased the hairpin table leg on ebay.

Patti wrote:

I’m very bad at always wanting something unique, one of a kind. Necessity breeds invention, you know, and I can never find EXACTLY what I’m looking for, so I usually have to make it up. For the snack bar, I wanted something simple that looked like it was probably in my kitchen originally (this is a modest ranch), and I wanted a place… to snack!

The snack bar substrate is 3/4″ particle board. I bought a 4×8 sheet at Home Depot and had them cut it for me to my rough dimensions because it’s hard for me to handle a full sheet by myself.

Anywho, I’m a McGyver-er from way back, so I cabbaged around the garage for scraps. I didn’t have screws short enough to attach the table leg to the bar, so I found a piece of 1×4 to use as a spacer. I attached the table to the wall with leftover shelving corners cut to 24″ and secured into the wall studs.

The bar was going to be 36″ square but it overpowered the space so I cut it down to 30″. And, it’s counter-height, so I had to cut 2″ off the bar stool legs cause they were too high.

DIY boomerang clock — Belart style

Then the wall above was too blah, and I found this clock I loved on eBay but it sold for $810. Yikes! And I thought, hey, I’ll just make my own!

This listing gave me the idea on the shape of my clock. I had laminate left over from the kitchen and particle board left over from a piece of MDF from making my platform bed. I drew out the shape, and Darin cut it out for me because his hand is steadier than mine 😉

The clock is a scrap piece of Masonite board, I drew, he cut. I painted it to match the cabinets, clock mechanism from Amazon for $10.

The 3-6-9-12 spots are biscuits (I have a biscuit joiner!) and I wrapped them with aluminum foil (ha!) and the 1-2-4-5-7-8-10-11 dots are the wooden tip of a paint brush dipped in silver paint and dotted on. Voila!

Voila indeed! Nicely done, Patti, thank you for sharing your design! And, I learned that “cabbage” can be used a verb — I am going to start doing that, too! Yay for all the MacGuyvers among us!