Adding a Spice Niche To Your Kitchen
If you've been following our kitchen renovation journey over on Instagram, you might know by now that we were trying to expose our original chimney in the kitchen while gaining some floor space. Once we opened up the walls, we realized that when they added the oil furnace, they also reworked the chimney and it now doesn't allow for any space being gained in one of the directions. Bummer!
Rob and I after multiple renovations in this house now have realized that if we rush through a project, our best ideas are often missed until it's too late. So, with the walls wide-open, kids asleep, we poured some strong dark and stormy's and stared. Want to know what we came up with? A spice niche!
If you don't know what a spice niche is, it's creating an alcove around your stove area to house your oil's, salt and pepper, and any of your favourite spices. Because we have limited counterspace in the kitchen, it seems like a no brainer. On the far side of the chimney wall there is about a 10 cm gap running all the way up. We would create two separate wooden niches using wood that we already had on hand. The top one would be deeper and for my favourite cookbooks that I use on a daily basis. The bottom, would be for our quick grabs like the salt and pepper shaker and our oil.
We measured everything up, sanded and stained the wood to match our floating shelves, created the frame of the box and then attached the back to create a strong shape. Then in the new wall that we are studding in, we are creating a framework to house and hold these boxes. We install the boxes making sure they are level to each other, and then utilizing the nickel gap vertical shiplap, we will ship lap around the entire boxes.
The funny thing is, we came up with this plan around 9 PM one night. I was wanting to use the backsplash tile on the inside, but Rob was very insistent on utilizing wood to give that space some warmth. The next day, while on Instagram I realized my favourite interior designer had also posted a wood niche. I was already sold on the idea for our space due to Rob's convincing, but after seeing the way she styled one I knew it had to be in our house.
What do you think about spice niches? Would you add one to your house?
