DIY Mudroom Makeover: Entryway Coat Rack Transformation
Our mudroom was the longest slog of renovation we’ve done. I’d made a shoe bin area and entryway coat rack the first week we lived in the house and that served us for almost a year until, with a newborn, we decided to take on the rest of it over six weeks during naptime and with bleary eyes.
The renovation was necessitated by a massive plywood opening leftover from when we closed off a door in our bedroom for our plank accent wall and then when coronavirus hit we needed a designated home office area.
Nothing like a global pandemic to spur you into action, right?
The room was originally a sunroom with a verrryyyyy deep DIY storage bench built by the last homeowner. It was massive, like six feet deep, and was only accessible by doors in the front which made it not very helpful because you couldn’t store anything the full way in or you’d never be able to reach it.
We felt a little bad about taking it out because it was clearly a built-in made by hand, but you’ve gotta make your home your own.
This was such a detailed project we’re going to document it in parts over a couple of posts because, well, I can ramble and have a lot to say about this room because it’s such a big transformation and added so much function to our house.
First things first, here’s how to build an entryway coat rack.
On This Page
Tools & Materials
Tools
Shoe storage bench
- (2) 0.75-inch thick plywood pieces at 14×74 inches long (for the top and bottom piece)
- (5) plywood pieces at 14×16.75 inches long (for the two end pieces and the two middle divider pieces)
- (1) 0.25-inch plywood at 74 wide x 18.25 inches high (for the back panel)
Coat rack area
- (5) 1×2 at 48 inches (for the vertical dividers on the wall)
- (4) Coat hooks (this is a style preference, but we bought these)
- (2) 1×4 at 74 inches (to go across the top and bottom of the wall hook area)
Upper shelves
- (2) 1×12 at 72 inches long (for the top and bottom piece)
- (2) 1×12 At 14 inches long (for the end pieces)
- (3) 1×12 At 11.5 inches long (for the divider pieces)
- (1) 0.25 inch plywood panel at 14”x 74“ (for the back panel)
(This list is assuming you have everything in our Getting Started with DIY Toolbox)
How We Built Our Entryway Coat Rack
This was very much a trial-and-error, learn-as-we-go kind of journey. The room is really sloped toward the exterior door (thanks, old house) which gave us a lot of issues, and we changed our minds a couple of times on the design we liked for each part of the room, but in the end it all added so much storage and function to an otherwise kind of meh room that it was worth it.
We worked from the ground up, doing the bench first, then the hook area then the upper cabinets.
However, the shoe storage cubbies are exactly the same concept as the upper cabinets so you could make them at the same time for efficiency (we didn’t do this because we made the coat rack area in our quick phase one project, then added the upper cabinets later in our second round of mudroom DIY.)
Remove the Base Trim
Depending on the wall you’re installing this bench on, you may need to remove the lower trim. It can be intimidating, but it’s absolutely worth giving it a go because it’ll allow your bench to sit flush with the wall and look more like a professional built-in. Ours was a biiiiitch because we think the floor was tiled and grouted after the trim was in and we had to basically cut away at concrete to get it up rather than prying it loose, but hopefully yours isn’t that bad!
Lower trim is usually pretty easy to remove. You’re going to want to use a box cutter to cut away the caulking between the wall and the trim, and the trim and the floor if there is any. Then, hold your pry bar face down in the crack you’ve exposed between the trim and wall and gently tap it with a hammer to sink it lower into that gap.
Gently, emphasis on the gently, pull the pry bar towards you to separate that trim from the wall but don’t pull too hard or you may crack it and/or the wall and need to start again. Instead, pull a little, then move the pry bar along that seam and keep doing that until you get from end to end.
Note: If you’re worried about damaging the wall, you can put a piece of scrap wood or shim between the prybar and the wall to help offset some of the pressure.
Build Your Shoe Storage Bench
Take your bottom piece (one of the 74-inch plywood pieces) and hold it upright on your workbench, then set the 16.75-inch divider plywood pieces evenly along the whole piece, with one at each end and two in the middle (17.5 inches apart if you’re using our measurements).
From the underside of the 74-inch bottom piece, drill two 1.5 inch screws into each short 16.75-inch piece to hold it in place. Then flip the whole thing so that long piece is now on the bottom. Sit your second 74-inch piece on top and do the same thing, screwing down the divider pieces to secure them in place.
Nail your 0.25-inch plywood piece along the back as a back panel.
Set the cubby in place up against the wall. Screw 3-inch screws in from the inside corners through the plywood and into the wall. Wood fill over all the screws you can see – likely the ones going into the wall and the ones on the very top of the cubbies going down into the dividers, and give it all a good sanding.
Add in Your Vertical Slats
Note: We spackled over the area of wall that we were working on to make it flat, whereas the rest of this room is paneling. We wrote a blog post about how we did that on a bigger scale in our bedroom here.
Place your 74-inch 1×4 horizontally on the wall across the top of the shoe cubby. You can either screw or nail them in place, depending on preference. We used wood glue because it doesn’t hold any weight so doesn’t need to be super secure. Take your first 1×2 piece and hold it up on the wall at the left edge of the shoe cubby area, on top of the horizontal 1×4 piece. Glue/nail it into place.
Repeat this three times across the wall, aligning each of the vertical slats with the dividers on the shoe cubby. Once they’re all in place, put the second 1×4 across the top of all those vertical slats and secure in place.
Find the center of each of the rectangular sections between the vertical slats, and then make a mark 9 inches down from the top. This is where your coat rack hooks will go (preferably this will be into studs if you can make the measurements work. Not all of ours are but they hold weight just fine.)
Build Your Upper Cubbies
If you didn’t do double duty earlier and build your upper cubbies at the same time as your shoe storage bench, just repeat that exact same process.
Once it’s all done, hold it up on top of the 1×4 piece at the top of the vertical slats (a two-man job for sure) and then use big 3 inch screws in each corner to secure it to the wall (and a couple into studs to be extra secure).
Final Touches
Go around and caulk all of the gaps, cracks and seams. Grab your caulk gun, hold it at a 45-degree angle and spread a thin line of caulk all along your seam. There are plenty of caulk-spreading tools you can buy but we find dunking your finger in some warm water and running it over the caulk right after gives the smoothest finish. Keep some paper towel on hand to wipe up any smears right away.
Give it all a coat of primer (which we always recommend before painting unfinished wood surfaces to minimize the grain look coming through your paint job) and then a couple coats of paint.
Measure out how much trim you’ll need. Trim is a magical tool to make everything look finished and it can fix endless uneven edges, shitty cuts and bad paint jobs.
We put trim around basically every edge and pre-painted it, then glued it in place. Pre-painting is a PRO TIP especially if you don’t have the steady hands of a surgeon because it’ll make your paint job look so profesh.
Now you’re done! Just add some cute baskets (we used these ones) to store shoes out of the way and keep all your junk out-of-sight in the upper cubbies with these wire baskets!
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I love how this turned out!!