We bought a house built in 2004, and it has one of those built-in desk setups right at the end of the kitchen cabinet run. It has a lower countertop height than the rest of the kitchen, a drawer for pens, and an open space underneath where a chair is supposed to go. The backsplash wall behind it even has an old telephone jack.
Literally nobody in my house uses this space for a desk. Right now, it’s just a massive junk pile. It’s where the mail gets thrown, keys get dropped, and random charging cords sit. It looks messy all the time.
Since we are planning to redo the kitchen walls and cabinetry soon, I want to completely eliminate this desk area. It feels like a total waste of valuable square footage. I’m trying to decide what to put there instead. My initial thought is to make it a dry bar or a coffee station by raising the counter up to standard kitchen height, putting a small beverage fridge underneath, and doing some cool floating shelves on the wall above it with accent lighting.
Has anyone else successfully converted one of these awkward 2000s kitchen desks into something actually functional? Did you run into any issues matching the new cabinets with the old ones, or did you just make that specific section look like a separate piece of custom furniture? Any creative layout ideas would be awesome because anything is better than this current mess.