There's A Smarter Way To Create A Coffee Station With A $20 Thrift Store Find

Welcome back to The Thrifted Fix, a weekly column where our writers turn thrift store finds into the ultimate solutions for everyday home problems.

Kitchens are always evolving to meet our needs. Recently, after another round of reimagining our kitchen, the wife and I wound up with a well-defined need and no good solution: We needed a coffee and tea station with a prep sink. We also had an oddball wall to work with — half is a 4-foot partition wall, and the other half is an 8-foot partition wall. The problem was fitting the right combination of things into our increasingly unfitted kitchen.

It turns out that what we needed was a buffet and a countertop that was a bit too long for it — and we just so happened to have both. I ultimately had to use two countertops: two live-edge walnut tabletops gifted to us by my father-in-law. The buffet itself, however, was a $20 thrifted find. 

Finding a decent buffet in a thrift store is, at least around here, something of a unicorn. So, even though you might think I was super-excited about our lucky vintage find, I was a little hesitant to use it to hold the massive kitchen sink for which we had originally bought it. After butchering the top to accommodate the sink, we originally went a different route and stuck the buffet on our back porch, which has temporarily turned into storage for oddities that don't fit anywhere else. Then, as is her wont, my wife had a brainwave one day that solved several problems and gave the buffet a second life as our coffee bar, which is what it is now.

The available space for our coffee bar was a few feet wider than the buffet itself. To make the best use of the over-long countertop, we'd have to leave the adjacent corner empty ... wasted space. As we pondered this, my wife (again in her role as the smart one) solved two problems at once. We had a bar/prep sink and reverse-osmosis faucet installed in a freestanding lower cabinet unit that was completely out of place in the kitchen. Why not, she asked, just run the tabletop all the way to the wall and install the prep sink in it?

Everything started to come together quickly at that point, making it relatively easy to create the ultimate coffee station. I cut the tabletop as long as the wall — 21 inches longer than the buffet — and cut a hole for the prep sink on the right. Finishing up, we hung a simple curtain to cover the plumbing and less-than-aesthetic sink components on the exposed end.

A manual juicer and our coffee and tea apparatus take up the rest of the counter. The buffet and wall cabinet above neatly store various beverage-related supplies. The one device that I haven't found a home for yet is our water-carbonating rig, which I'll integrate into the coffee bar at some point. Still, with the sink to the side and in line with all of our equipment on a spacious countertop, every step of the process in fixing our daily drinks is easy to pull off with minimal fuss.

As kitchen projects go, this one went smoothly. Our hero, the vintage buffet, was painted black earlier in life by some townie with an Instagram account using a paintbrush that must have been made from a tire's radial belt. And maybe the only task I detest more than painting is stripping paint or stain from wood, unless it can be done with a belt sander. We decided to just leave it black. Installing the prep sink did require re-plumbing, but I happened to be working on a new bathroom on the opposite side of the wall that I could easily tie it into, so there couldn't have been a better time to re-work it.

The walnut tabletops were insanely heavy slabs held together with iron bracing, similar to the C-channel used to keep wood slabs and live-edge tabletops from splitting, but T-shaped in profile. I was apprehensive about removing them and considered shortening and reinstalling them ... and I still might. For the moment, the tabletops are freewheeling, other than the Z-clips holding them to the buffet. I cut the coffee bar countertop with a circular saw after measuring about 40 times. The length was perfect, and the sink dropped right in.

I still need to seal the wood countertops to protect against damage, probably with an eco-friendly polyurethane product my wife found. Who knew non-toxic polyurethane was even possible? And at some point, I need to install trim and caulk around everything to tidy up and seal everything, but if there's one thing I've learned from our kitchen, it's to not get in a big hurry gluing, screwing, and nailing things "permanently" into place.