For a busy family, even a small mudroom can change the whole flow of a home. Just ask Emily Allison, whose entryway off the garage of her Houston home caught a lot of clutter but lacked a real system for corralling the family of three’s outerwear and bags.
To devise a fix, Emily cleared out the space so she could create a mini drop zone. First, she used paint she had on hand to make bold navy and white stripes on the wall of the entry—a feature she’d wanted to include in her home elsewhere but lacked a logical spot for.
Then, she worked with her cousin’s husband, Ben Landers, to design a custom storage seat, which he built for her out of cabinet-grade birch plywood. Emily painted it with the same leftover white paint used on the walls to give it a bright, clean look. Storage baskets borrowed from other parts of the house provide places to hide shoes.
A charming coatrack—a $10 garage-sale steal—holds outerwear, keys, and her 3-year-old’s school gear, no longer strewn around the house; a new chevron rug stops dirt at the door. “Sometimes you do a room and get tired of it,” says Emily, who blogs at decorchick.com.
“I still really love that room. I haven’t changed a thing about it!”
The Project Tally
This budget-friendly approach echoes other reader-driven mudroom makeovers featured in This Old House Magazine. DIYer Maggie Overby, a military wife who frequently relocates, tackled a similar problem in an underused space off her garage: “Pet bowls were everywhere, and the dogs would eat the cat food and vice versa. Plus, the kids had nowhere to drop their stuff except in the kitchen. I thought we could kill two birds with one stone with this project.” Like the makeover here, her solution leaned on repurposed pieces trimmed out to look custom-built.
• Created large graphic stripes on the wall with paint she had on hand $0
• Constructed a bench from birch plywood and pine 1x2s and 1x4s, then trimmed it out with stop molding before coating it with leftover paint $65
• Scored a chalkboard coatrack at a yard sale $10
• Finished off the space with a bright cotton area rug $20
Total: $95
Pro Tip: Building a custom bench like this one lets you tailor the size, finish, and storage to your space—something pre-made options rarely allow. As one This Old House carpenter explained while demonstrating a similar build, a comparable store-bought piece with hooks and a bench ran around the price of a small appliance, but “maybe I don’t want something that’s black. Maybe this isn’t the right size, it won’t fit next to my back door.” Building it yourself solves all of that.
