This is one of my favorite projects my husband and I have worked on. The mudroom was a huge selling point for us when we bought our home; it is the perfect little spot to drop our bags and kick off our shoes when we get home. It also has a wall of shelves to serve as our pantry, which is great because our previous house didn’t have this type of space for food storage. Unfortunately, after a few months of use, this room looked ROUGH. The ‘before’ pictures are actually pretty embarrassing. Judge away, my friends. There is one song that comes to mind when I look back at the before pictures:
U-G-L-Y, You ain’t got no alibi, You UGLY!
THE BEFORE
We hung a calendar.. A for effort? And we still recycle/hoard egg cartons, just not in plain view. 😉
Check out that coffee table turned bench. Y’all, this room needed HELP.
I’m still not sure how I even knew what we had in our pantry. I always found unopened things that I thought we didn’t have, which resulted in more money wasted, more space taken up and more MESS.
THE MAKEOVER
First Things First
the paint:
For the walls, I chose Valspar Dover Gray. I never do much research before I pick out a paint color. I just go into Lowe’s and hope I pick a decent color based off those little sample cards (Why are there so many?). I wanted a shade on the darker side to help hide scuff marks and dirt that easily makes it way to the walls in a mudroom. Luckily, this color turned out to be amazing and is probably my favorite in the house. It dries a lot darker than it looks in (and on.. oops), the can. It’s perfect. I’m obsessed.
the floors:
For the floors, we took a trip to Floor & Decor and found exactly what we had envisioned for them. We chose Julyo Wood Plank Ceramic Tile. Sturdy and modern. Love them.
Replacing The Sad WannaBe Coffee Table “Bench”
This beauty is actually made out of seperate IKEA pieces. My husband is a frequent Pinterest user (shh! I didn’t tell you that) and he found this idea from IKEAhackers. It looks amazing. My husband impresses me sometimes. Haha, but seriously, it turned out great. My favorite part is the drawers for our shoes. No more tripping over 29 pairs of shoes! #winning
Organizing The Pantry
So clearly I needed to figure out a way to organize the pantry shelves. I decided to sort the food into groups. The groups I created were: Baking, Lunch, Snacks, Bread, Supplements & Extra. I used reusable chalkboard labels with chalk markers to label the six gray bins that I found on amazon.
Next, I took everything that was resealable (cereal, pasta, oatmeal, granola, quinoa, rice, cheddar bunnies, marshmallows, flax seed, chia seeds, etc) and dumped them each into three different sized mason jars. Doing this helped keep things, like the cereal, sealed better than in a rolled up bag. (Hello? Why haven’t they come out with ziplock cereal bags?!) I also really like using the mason jars because I’m able to see when we are getting low on certain things.
** Quick tip **
Cut out the expiration from the boxes you’re dumping from and tape them to the back of each jar
OR
Use a dry erase marker and write the expiration of each item on the back on the mason jar.
Finishing Touches
I added a few finishing touches and created a little family command center. My husband cut the counter from the desk in the ‘before’ pictures and turned it into a shelf. It works great for charging our phones since the outlet is right above it.
Let me know what you think!
I’d love to hear all about makeovers you’ve done in your home!
-Kristen
