Me and my hubby started out our life together as newlyweds in Minnesota, the land of snow and bitter winter temps. Some of the best advice we received while we lived there was, "Once you have kids, never buy a house without a mudroom." Let's face it. Kids haul a lot of stuff to school in the winter, book bags, puffy coats, hats, gloves and snow boots. And their little legs and arms make it pretty impossible for them to hang their stuff up on their own in your standard hall closet with wire racks. 

Unfortunately when we bought our house in Illinois, we didn't heed this advice. Now that we have two kids in school their stuff was starting to pile up all over the house. And no one ever knew where their coat or shoes were when it was time to head out of the door. I had seen the idea of converting a hall closet into a mudroom around Pinterest before, so me and the hubby decided to give it a try. Here is how it turned out.

Luckily for us, we have an additional hall closet by our front door, so the hall closet by the garage door was a perfect candidate for this makeover. We used this post from Make It & Love It for our inspiration. Our closet is a lot smaller, so we made tweaks accordingly. I basically sent this post to my hubby and told him to make it happen. Boy, do I love him!

You will have to trust him when a I tell you that nail gun and miter saw are going to make this project a whole lot easier. He recommends the Ryobi Cordless Brad Nailer and the Dewalt DW715 Miter Saw. I'm hoping an investment in tools like this means we can put up some shiplap and crown molding soon. 

Once he was done with the build out, he tagged me in to fill the nail holes and caulk the gaps and seams. He joked that Chip was handing the baton off to JoJo (all you Fixer Upper fans will understand). After I got done filling and caulking, I came to the conclusion that Jo would had left this job to Chip. It's tedious, and you definitely need a lot of patience for it. You need to fill every nail hole with wood filler and fill in all the seams with all purpose caulk. Then sand everything down and wipe it down with a tack cloth.

We had some paint left over from painting our baseboards a while back. I used Sherwin Williams ProClassic Acrylic Latex in Semi Gloss. The mudroom is going to get a lot of traffic and using a semi gloss will make it super easy to wipe up. In fact, my 2 year old found a pencil this weekend and wrote all over the bench. It cleaned up with a little soap and water. Whoop, whoop! 

We decided to remove the door to the closet as well because we were really happy with the way it looked. The hallway is really tight with the door, and it was always getting caught on the rug. I filled up all the holes in the frame with more wood filler, sanded them down and finished them off with a couple of coats of my ProClassic paint.

I completed the mudroom with some Seagrass storage baskets from Target. Here is another storage basket option I found on Amazon. The great thing about Seagrass is it won't scratch your floors. I also bought the hooks from Target, but you can also find some more hook options over at Amazon if you don't want to leave the house. Lastly, to really make the white woodwork pop I painted the walls in the closet Sherwin Williams Special Gray to match the accent wall in our family room. I love the rich, dark gray against the pure white trim.

We are super happy with how this turned out, but the best part of all is that the kids can now hang up their stuff all on their own! Do you have a closet dying for this makeover?  

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