Townhome Tuesday: Closet Converted into Mini Mudroom

After touring through houses on the Salt Lake Parade of Homes I got really jealous of all of the gorgeous mudrooms in each home, but the entryway into our house is way too tiny for a mudroom. I looked online for a lot of ideas for ways to put a mudroom area in the garage, but all of those methods look like they took a lot of work. So instead Zach and I worked on converting our coat closet into a mini mud room (we have another coat closet upstairs, otherwise I would have been more reluctant to give up my coat/jacket storage area).

The first step was to remove the door. I was worried about the holes that would be left behind in the molding - but it turns out that they're not really that noticeable. We also removed the hanger rod that was in there. Then we just put in a ton of mismatched IKEA pieces that luckily ended up fitting in the area perfectly (it actually wasn't luck, Zach and I modeled the closet and pieces up in Google Sketch-up before buying anything). We have two DVD towers on the sides for shoes, a bench in the middle with a homemade cushion, cheap baskets to hold all of our stuff, and two cute picture frames to tie the area together.

Every piece of furniture in here comes from IKEA. The total cost was around $250.

We got two Benno DVD towers from IKEA for shoe storage on either side of the closet. The shoes stick out a little, but I've decided that I'm okay with it, it's still better than what we had before.

These are the Knarra baskets from IKEA. I got the unfinished kind and painted them.

This is the Hemnes shoe storage bench from IKEA.

We made a cushion with fabric, padding, and a thin wood piece at the bottom. We just stapled the fabric to the wood piece to keep it tight over the padding.

These frames were also from IKEA. We used the staple gun to attach the ribbon to the back of the frames (nothing else would hold). Zach attached the knobs to the wall using this tutorial. Then I tied and re-tied the ribbons about 15 times to get them to hang as evenly as possible.

 Since the closet only provided enough storage for my shoes, I got this Stall shoe storage cabinet from IKEA for Zach's shoes. I got the white cabinet and painted the drawer fronts yellow.

 Here's the view from the top of the stairs. The mini mudroom is on the left.