Mudroom Makeover | Rethinking The Space

This month I am participating in a $100 Room Challenge, and I’ve taken on our garage mudroom.

This space was built by the previous owners and already had built in shelves, a utility sink and a pretty window (with a gorgeous view of all our sports equipment, gardening supplies and junk in the garage 🙂 ). I added beadboard wallpaper and paint – lots of paint – and it’s been extraordinarily functional for my family of five for the past few years.

Sadly it’s been taken over by muddy, outgrown cleats, mittens missing mates, tools I’m too lazy to put away, dog paraphernalia for our old sweet pup who is no longer with us…..you get the point.

It’s time to reclaim this space!!! The goals –

Clean it out,

reconfigure the shelving,

make this little room more functional for our current needs

and make it a little more aesthetically pleasing.

 

This is a blurry old shot from way back when we moved in, and I was painting and adding beadboard wallpaper to the space. It shows the layout of a utility sink with shallow shelves above it, and deep shelving to the right of it. While I appreciate all these shelves for storage, it’s an awkward layout because the wall facing the sink is underutilized.

My plan is to use the sink side as a utility space – storage for the vacuum, mop, bucket, all that good stuff, and the other side as a mudroom – space for boots, shoes and jackets.

This week my accomplishments included pulling every last thing out of the room and finding new homes for many items (a daunting task my friends!!!!) AND putting a light switch cover on. So you know – I’m basically done 🙂

Here is what I am envisioning…..

Taking out the existing shelving on the wall to the right of the sink.

The wrapping paper area was great when my kids were younger and were going to birthday parties all the time, but despite all my efforts to keep my munchkins little forever, that time of our life has passed and we just don’t need this whole space devoted to gift wrap and kid craft supplies anymore.

Okay it stinks that the kiddos have to grow up, but now we have a houseful of teenagers hanging out here all the time and that’s awesome too!  I love love love having a pile of kids here! So I’m embracing this season of life we’re in and looking towards the future and what we actually need, what we really really need

is a place for shoes and boots, and more coat hooks.

I’m hoping to reuse the wood from the back wall, along with scraps in my garage, to create a version of the bench part of Ana White’s “Smiling” Mudroom across the whole wall under the window.

Did you know that all of Ana’s plans are free and tons of people share pics of their completed projects? Perusing Ana’s site is a great way to get some ideas and figure out exactly how to build something. There is something for everyone there, from the novice builder to the experienced, and Ana is so down to earth. One of my all time favorite sites.

On either side of the window I’ll re-configure the hooks that have worked great for us so far, and double our coat storage.

The floor is already this very happy shade of green:

Next week I hope to show you how I reconstructed what I already had to work with!

I’m in the midst of all the drudgery and disaster right now, but hopefully this room will be beautified by the end of the month!

Trying to rework a space with a budget of $100 really is challenging, but it can be done! Do you have a space that could use a little love too? Come enter the $100 Visa gift card giveaway on Instagram to kickstart your own room makeover. It ends tomorrow night!

Check out the progress of all the other $100 Room Challengers below, and have a great weekend friends!