Laundry Room/ Mudroom Progress ( A Mini Makeover for Less than $150)

Good morning and happy Sunday! I hope you all are having a wonderful weekend so far. Today I wanted to share the pictures of the first part of my laundry room/mudroom makeover. For part one I wanted to add a built in area to hang coats, bags and store shoes and other stuff and paint that and the cabinets to match. And then for part two, once I decide on a wallpaper, I plan on adding some board and batten to the rest of the room and wallpaper above it. So hopefully I will be tackling that in the next few weeks. Eventually I would like to update the floor too but I need help getting the washer and dryer out of the space to tackle that and this time of year with basketball season in full swing, that’s not high on the list in our house right now – ha! Once I chose the wallpaper I’ll find a runner and at least that will help hide the floor a bit for now.

So for this first part of the makeover I didn’t want to spend much money and wanted it to be a project I could tackle in a couple of days. By sticking with a paint color I already had on hand (I had almost a gallon left over from our kitchen island) all I had to do was get some wood, hooks and new cabinet pulls. So to built the new piece and add hardware I came in just under $150!

I had looked at tons and tons of mudrooms on Pinterest for inspiration and stuck with a look that I knew I could do myself pretty easily. There were plenty of inspiration pictures that I loved more than this with doors and hidden storage, but I wasn’t sure if I could pull off the design on most of them so I stuck with a pretty basic overall look by mixing a few designs I liked together and am happy with how it turned out and how easy it was! I was able to do it myself in just a couple of days and now we have a much more functional space.

Here is the before which had kind of a wasted dead space to the left of the washer and dryer. The door to the left opens to the garage and therefore we go in and out of this space a hundred times a day and I figured this would be a great little drop-zone for the girls bags, coats and shoes.

And here it is now. I first built the bench (the back and left side are sitting on a bracket that is attached to studs in the wall), and then I also added some legs to both the front and back (and possibly may add one in the middle if I feel like it is going to start sagging, although as of right now I don’t think that will be an issue. Once I had the bench part built I just added some basic board and batten above it and then added a shelf on top of that. Then I primed and painted both that and the cabinets next to it. And then to finish it off I added some hooks that I found on Amazon and some new pulls for the cabinet and that was it!

Here’s another before from slightly further back. This is a very small, narrow space with no natural light so it was hard to get a decent photo:

And here it is with the first project crossed off:

These hooks were such a great deal on Amazon:

You can’t beat the price! I used these same ones in Lola’s room and couldn’t find anything else I liked for this good of a price so decided to use them again!

The baskets on the top shelf are great for storing some of the stuff we don’t use daily like extra dog leashes and some other things like that.

The baskets below the bench are really large. The girls can each fit their backpack in one with room for other stuff as well.

Here’s the space from the other angle. The girls each have their own laundry basket too. We’ve been using that system in the last four places we’ve lived and I am a big fan of it! We’ve added a counter above the washer and dryer in our last two laundry rooms and really liked that so I’m considering doing the here too at some point.