Hello friends! I have been looking forward to getting this post together for you all for quite some time. I have to say nothing else on my Instagram page gets more questions than that of the changes we made in our mudroom and how we made our Ikea Hemnes mudroom storage unit. Here I will walk you through what we did in this shared laundry/mudroom post, and how we did it on a low budget to make this a much more functional and useful space. Now, I can actually look forward to coming in here and doing laundry rather that shutting the door and walking right past it, in fact we even took the door off in here so we can walk by and just admire all our hard work!
Ok so let's get to the before pic of this space first so you can truly appreciate how much work we did in here and the reason why I actually like doing laundry now (I know right?).....
Not much to look at there right? I very boring laundry space indeed. I mean the machines were so deep and high up on those pedestals I could never reach those little cabinets up above! I'm only 5'2" and I gotta say it did drive me a little crazy to get up there every time with a step stool just to get my laundry supplies, which I might add didn't even fit in those small cabinets most of the time anyway. I know, I know, I sound a bit ridiculous complaining about these things, but trust me I am very thankful to even have this dedicated laundry space AND on the main floor with this house! In our last houses all of our laundry rooms were in the basement and I gotta say I wasn't a fan of hauling up loads of laundry all the times, especially with having little babies and the mountains of laundry that came along with them!
Ok onto the next pics below. I never snapped enough pics of this space beforehand, but you can see my husband working in here mid-reno. Here you can see the frame of the old mudroom closet after he ripped it out. This oversized closet sat right across from our washer and dryer, which was so awesome cause every time I opened the doors of the washer and dryer I had to turn to the side so I wouldn't get sandwiched into the closet doors.
It already looks SO much bigger in here by taking out that stupid closet. Once the closet was taken down, the ceiling was mis-matched from the popcorn texture missing from where the frame was, so we scraped the popcorn off the ceiling using a water bottle and drywall knife. All we did was lightly mist the popcorn with water and scraped it off in long strokes. Gotta say you guys, this is one messy job, but man is it satisfying to see it go, and so easily too...it comes right off because ours wasn't even painted! We were going to just go ahead and paint the ceiling, but decided because it was such a small space, that this was a great opportunity to get creative and add some character in here, and that included the ceiling too. We attached some faux shiplap right over top of the area we scraped and went ahead and painted it white. I could already see this space taking on a whole new vibe just from the white shiplap up above!
Ok, so now onto the flooring. Gotta love those classic 12×12″ white floor tiles of the ’90s right? They needed to go ASAP! The grout was so black from years of dirt there was no chance of cleaning them, so I never even tried. Also, the tiles had been so badly damaged and cracked from all the years they were literally falling apart. If most of you guys know me, I like to work with what we have if we can to try to save money, but in certain cases such as this flooring, we just had to rip then out and buy new.
Here you can already see the exciting progress of what’s being done! The washer and dryer are out, the closet is ripped out and so is that awful flooring! We literally had a blank room to work with which to me was just the best part of all. So here Curtis is installing our new floor tiles, aren’t they pretty!?
At this point the flooring is finished guys, yay (grout and floor tile links below)!! Also we did have some minor drywall repair work to do to the walls after the old closet was ripped out. I painted the walls in one of my favourite colours from Sherwin Williams Agreeable Grey as well as painting out all our new baseboards and trim in Benjamin Moore Simply White. Now we are installing our Ikea pieces to create a usable mudroom bench and storage unit. The best thing about this is we already had the Ikea pieces on hand in our basement (links below) so we didn’t even need to go out and spend any more money!
I looked at it one day and thought maybe this could somehow be used as a bench in our mudroom and the top bridging shelf as a place to hold baskets for extra storage for the kids’ gear. So off I ran upstairs and measured the wall where the closet was and was so excited to see it would fit with and with three inches to spare, whoopie go me!!!! I told Curtis and he loved the idea too which is always a bonus when the hubs is on board!
* Update
Since I wrote this article Ikea no longer sells the bridging shelf in the 58" length as well as in the white. The only one they currently sell is this one.
So we brought the bottom piece into the garage and started to beef it up by adding lattice wood strips on the drawer fronts and beefing up the top of the bench to make it look like a thick wood bench top. We used shiplap for the top of the bench (shiplap is 4mm presanded plywood that we get cut down to 6" strips from Home Depot) the reason we went with shiplap on the top is because we didn't want to add any more thickness to the top of the bench being that it was already high enough for us. Using our brad nailer we nailed down the shiplap boards down into the Ikea bench. After the shiplap was all attached we just finished out the edge and made a frame around the top of the bench using 1x2" pine boards and mitered the corners to get a nice finished frame look.