Anyone with a Pinterest account has certainly come across more than a few dreamy, spacious, and impossibly clean mudrooms. I’ve certainly pinned my fair share of ones that are easily 4x the size of my actual usable space…

But they got me thinking… who says bigger is better? Heck, I figure the smaller it is, the quicker it is to clean!  🙂

After many months of searching, I finally found this Goldilocks of mudrooms on This Old House… not too big, not too small, just right for us!

So I sat down to sketch out my own design based on the dimensions of our space. That’s when I came across the first wrinkle. I realized that I couldn’t design ANY exact measurements until I found and purchased the baskets that I wanted to use in the cubes on the left side. That took a few days, but I finally found some on sale at Michaels. Y’all – I walked into the store on a whim, not knowing if they even SOLD baskets there, and lo and behold they were having a 50% off baskets sale. Sometimes my shopping luck is just unreal!

Once I had those on hand, I was able to use their dimensions to design the cubes and then figure out how much space that left me for the other parts of the design. Many sketches and wadded up pieces of paper later…. I had my design! The piece on the left shows the cubes, bench, hooks, and shelves. The front sheet is my cut list for two sheets of plywood. I even figured out which cuts I needed to have done by Home Depot versus which I could handle on my sliding compound miter saw.

 

So after my trip to Home Depot and help from one of their very patient employees, here are the plywood sections that I started with:

I painted  most of the wood pieces first, then cut them into the different shapes and sizes that I needed to assemble the different pieces of the built-in unit.

First, I put the bench mostly* together, then brought it in from the garage and affixed it to the space. The cube storage was also mostly assembled in the garage then installed on top of the bench.

*By “mostly”, I mean I got it completely assembled and then realized I couldn’t fit it into position because it was the exact size of the space that it was going into… so I had to take it back apart, pull off the left side panel, then fit it into place and nail it back together. Lesson learned! 🙂

It was kind of ugly for a while, but a little paint, trim, and board and batten in the locker area spruced it up nicely!

I jumped the gun last night and added the coat and bag hooks while the paint was still drying. I just couldn’t wait to see the finished product!

So here’s where it stands right now… you can see I still have lots of paint supplies out so that I can finish touching up a few areas… but it’s mostly done! Just need to let it dry, then I can add my linen-lined hyacinth baskets into the cubes on the left.

 

 

 

From start to almost finished… one more project down, and lots more storage space gained!