Project 5 of 7: Mudroom Benches

Finally a post that DOES have a before/after pic!

For those who hadn't seen it, or heard about it, we LOVE having a mud-room area in our garage. Here's a post I did on a different blog over a year and a half ago about the mud-room area in our old house: http://simplylivingwithmore.blogspot.com/2013/01/our-mud-room-what-works-for-us.html

That mudroom worked well for us for nearly 3 years, with only minor modifications. But now we have a new house, with a new garage... and no existing shelves or benches.

Our new garage DOES have lots of space.

And now it's more organized space!!

I designed these benches with some Pinterest inspiration from these sites:
http://alwayschasinglife.blogspot.com/2012/08/laundry-room-reveal.html
http://media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/originals/a3/62/67/a36267e27cdfd4607f9c034d9bd11265.jpg
http://www.polkadotchair.com/2011/01/make-your-own-mud-room-lockers.html
http://dixiedelights.blogspot.com/2013/06/honey-does-garage-before-after.html
http://thatsmyletter.blogspot.com/2012/07/l-is-for-lockers.html
http://eastcoastcreativeblog.com/2012/09/diy-mudroom-lockers-garage-mudroom.html

If you clicked on any of those links you may have noticed that ALL of them (including the post of our old mudroom) have upper shelves, and coat hooks, and our current set-up doesn't have those things.

Don't worry, that's still the plan. We (I mean *I*) decided to use Billy bookcases from Ikea for the upper shelves, since they are cheaper than buying lumber and building that many shelves myself (plus they're a lot less work). Then I checked finances and decided we should wait on the shelves until we get Dave's bonus check at the end of October. We have scheduled a trip to Ikea for November 1st, and hopefully within a week we will have the bookcases assembled and installed and the hooks and coats hung. :)