Laundry Room/Mudroom Renovation

Our house has a combination laundry room/mudroom. This is the room where we enter off the garage, so it's definitely the workhorse room of the house. After living here for 6 months I knew this room was not being utilized to its full potential. It serves a lot of purposes and I was simply sick of seeing the mess. So, it was time for operation functionality!

When we first moved in we thought it would be fun to have a locker system and each person gets a locker for their shoes and coats. While I still love the idea it just didn't work in this room. Below is a before picture (I forgot to take a true "before" picture, so this is actually way cleaner than it normally was since I had already picked up the shoes).

 The locker was really cutting the room off and the bright blue walls with the pink tile hurt my eyes.

As with every room in this house...there were a few holes to fill.

Our main goals with this room were:
1) clean and paint
2) add shoe and coat storage
3) Find organizational tools for holding the cleaning, ironing and drying supplies.
4) Add a family command center

This was a room we didn't want to spend much on, but it needed to be very functional and I think the finished product is perfect for us and we did everything for under $50!

Kyle built an awesome bench with cubbies for shoe storage (most of the wood he had from other projects)! He also created a row of hooks for bag and coat storage. I love how this looks, but the best part is the functionality!

We painted the walls the same gray as the kitchen and living room (with leftover paint). I also painted the trim, cabinets and doors white (they were pretty dingy and off-white before).

To make it more functional we took the shelves out of one of the closets to store the taller brooms and ironing board. We hung a drying rack, chore chart and mail/homework catcher. The only other thing I want to add is a cork board to hang up school announcements.

I love how clean and bright it feels. And now it functions so much better for our family. This room and the clutter always annoyed me, but I'm glad we waited a while to tackle this project because we were able to pinpoint exactly what we needed to make this room function efficiently.