Carving out a mudroom

One thing every family needs is a place to dump all their stuff when they walk in the door.  And preferably it's not on the floor right in FRONT of the door.  Right?

My hope in our new house was that the kids would come in the front door from school, go straight up the stairs to their rooms and put their coats and backpacks on the hooks on their doors.  I know, pipe dreams.  The reality is that they usually ride their bikes to and from school.  Their bikes are kept in the garage, therefore they come in the back door... and dump all their stuff on the floor.

I knew I had to transform the odd "broom room" into a mini mud room in some manner.  Here's what it looked like before:

Pretty exciting, I know.  Just a hodge podge of brooms and mops and cleaning supplies.  Oh, and doors.  It's hard to tell from the photos, but there are two doors that swing into this 3x5' room, really limiting it's usefullness.  So, step number one:  off with the doors.

Next up - wall treatment.  I'd been drooling over various inspiration pictures of moroccan tile stenciling, so I thought I'd give it a go.  There was an online template that I loosely followed (Jones Design Company).  Basically you create a template out of a cereal box or other cardboard, trace your design in pencil on the wall, and then paint the lines freehand with an appropriate sized paintbrush.  The tracing was easy as pie.

The painting wasn't really that bad either, it just took a while, as you can imagine.  The previous owners had left the paint that was used in the kitchen, so I used that, knowing it would be a match.  I had to do two coats to get good coverage.  And someday I will learn to use colored pencil in the color I'm painting, instead of lead pencil, which can be hard to cover.

The shelf unit was left by the previous owners.  I decided it would work perfect in this small space.  All it needed was a little decking out in the way of striped wrapping paper, a postcard, some containers and bins, etc.  I also wanted a better hook system and a bench.  These I found online.  Assembly required:

The color of the bench was a bit of a surprise.  In the pictures it looked like a nice medium brown.  Not so in real life.  More like a garish orange trying to pretend to be wood.  Bummer.  But that's the risk you take buying online.  It may have some paint headed its' way sometime in the future.  Here it is all finished:

I added a few decorative items to the top for fun:

And I see that I didn't take any pictures of the new hooks and back board.  Swell.  I'll just have to keep you in suspense!  To the right of the shelf unit is the electric breaker box.  Seems like a good opportunity for a message center with magnets!  I also found some cork tiles just to mix it up a bit.  So far it's working out pretty good for a "found" room.  No construction needed.  ;)