Our Garage Mudroom Makeover

Let me start this post off by saying I LOVE our house! My husband and I regularly look around and comment on how much we love our home and how lucky we feel to live here. But, I HATE the lack of storage in our entry way!!! When we bought out house I knew we would have to do something about storage for coats and shoes. Since we bought our house from studs I’m sure we could have had our builder put in a nice size coat closet. As overwhelmed first time home buyers we just didn’t think to ask for any changes (lesson learned). So here we are with a great house with ZERO storage in the entryway. Enter the need for a mudroom.

Planning

We decided to add a small mudroom area to our house but the question was where. Since we enter our house from the garage 95% of the time we decided to put the main mudroom in the garage.The next decision we had to make was what type of storage we should have. Benches, lockers, hall trees or wardrobes. We really went through it all. In the end we settled on a large enclosed storage unit. We came to this decision because we felt out coats would be more protected from the dirt and debris that inevitably ends up in a garage. Once we settled on closed storage we had to find custom plans or a pre-made option.

After much searching and measuring we decided to go with a customized Ikea Pax Wardrobe. We went with this option for the following reasons;

1. It looked easy, I was tackling this project solo so it had to be simple!
2. The wardrobes come in many different sizes including narrow widths. Since I park on this side of the garage we needed something narrow.
3. The wardrobe has a sliding door option, this is great since again I park in our garage.
4. Lots of different interior configurations and options.

I used the Pax Wardrobe planner to map out our needs, we went with two 75cm wide units in the tallest and narrowest size available. I added a pull out coat rack to each, shelves for shoes and another shelf for baskets. I highly recommend using the PAX planner it really made the process painless.

Assembly

Assembly of these units was actually really easy! I was thrilled because I was using these units in part as a trial run for our master closet. The actual boxes were very easy to assemble and place solo. Once I got them where I wanted them I used the anchoring system provided as well as some further reinforcement from my favourite drywall anchor system! We have used these all over our house and they have never failed me. I didn’t want to mess around finding studs to anchor into (I did hit two!) so these were perfect! Once the boxes were up it was time to hang the sliding doors and soft close system.

Now this was the hardest part! Youtube saved me because the instructions for the sliding doors were pretty minimal. Once I got the sliding door system set up I enlisted my husbands help to hang the doors on the tracks. I tried alone but the units are just under 8 feet, so I just couldn’t do it solo.

Once the doors were on I configured our shelves and our coat rack. Once the Pax wardrobe was fully assembled I decided the unit needed handles. I knew adding them would mean the doors wouldn’t open to there full range but I felt having something to grab onto was more important. I ordered these great flush handles of amazon and they were exactly what I was looking for. Once they were installed it was time to fill up the unit with shoes, coats and lay out the new runner (this was a great find!).

Final Product

I’m so happy with how this turned out. The shelves hold the perfect amount of shoes since we only keep our everyday shoes down here. All of our coats fit very comfortably on the racks (I didn’t think they would). And our baskets leave lots of room to grow. I filled one of the baskets with cold weather accessories, and reserved one for storing our sandals in for the winter.

What I love about this unit is that I can move things around very easily as our storage needs change. Like maybe after our first winter we realize we don’t use the baskets. We could remove them and move the self to create more room for shoes. I could even buy another set of shelves and move things around a bit more to create room for more shoes. It’s so great to be able to change things up in the future.

I’m so glad we tackled this problem area in our house and can’t wait to see how this works for us this fall and winter! Do you have a problem area in your house? How did you solve it?

Danielle xo