Mudroom Organization for Small Spaces

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Hello friends,

For July’s blog post, I’m sharing a very fun house project we just completed: the mudroom or entryway of our house.

Right, when you enter our house to the left-hand side there is a coat closet with two fold-able doors and a storage system that wasn’t going to work for our family. I’ve always loved the idea of a mudroom or entryway where we can hang coats, backpacks, hats, purses, store shoes in cubbies, and on-the-go items.

Since this space is the very first thing you see when you enter our house, we decided that it would be the perfect place to start updates in the house as well as practice our DIY skills so that eventually we can also work on the rest of the closets. Naturally, I headed over to Pinterest where I created an Entryway Organization Inspiration Board. I spent way too much time researching ideas and inspirations to create the perfect mudroom for a family of four.

Finally, narrowed it down to 3 options:

Build the mudroom ourselves
Purchase pieces of furniture from IKEA to create a mudroom system
Purchase a mudroom system from a closet company.

After so much indecisiveness (me), brainstorming ideas and calculating budgets, we decided that building the mudroom ourselves was going to be a much more cost effective option. When I came across Katie Lamb’s DIY Mudroom project and given all the specifications on her blog, this was the perfect design to transform the coat closet into a mudroom.

We headed over to HomeDepot to purchase all the materials needed to start the project. I’m very fortunate to have a very handy husband who is willing to bring out my Pinterest idea to reality. We followed Katie’s instructions with some modifications according to our space. The coat closet transformation is one of my favorite things we have done in the house. The design and space is perfect and simple just as we had envisioned.

There was a lot of measuring, adjusting, cutting, nailing, painting, caulking, sanding and stapling involved in this project before we started working on the fun part, which was styling and creating the organization system.

Once the structure of the mudroom was completed here is what we did to style and organize our new mudroom:

Use 3 large blue storage bins to hold our most frequently used shoes and reusable shopping bags. The bins were purchased at Aldi a few years ago but here is a link to very similar large bins in grey
Found the cutest Wall Coat Hooks in Satin Nickel at Target and bought 4.
Water Hyacinth Baskets were purchased at TJMaxx. If you are a TJMaxx shopper, you know that finding the same exact product at one location is pure luck. Just in case, you don’t have the same luck the Container Store has the same Water Hyacinth Baskets in Medium. Each basket is a home for mail, COVID-19 essentials (masks and hand sanitizer), outdoor essentials and one for extra socks and shoe covers.
Accessorized the bench with two Blush Calvin Klein pillow also found at TJMaxx and a grey rectangular throw pillow we already had.
Small wooden tray for keys and sunglasses.
Cute wreath was handmade by yours truly a few years ago and to be completely honest, I put it there for the looks, I know that eventually it will come down or be covered with coats, but isn’t it adorable?

Hope you enjoyed the mudroom inspiration, transformation and organization. A main reason we decided to go have a mudroom instead of a coat closet is because a coat closet can easily become a dumping area for unnecessary things, while having a mudroom forces us to maintain a simple and pretty space that reflects our lifestyle and taste. A mudroom becomes part of the home decor and it feels a lot more spacious and bright.