Our new mudroom

Today I’d like to introduce the workhorse of our house. We didn’t have a mudroom before, so there was no place for shoes, backpacks, coats, and all that outdoor stuff. Now we’ve got storage in spades, and my life as a mother has gotten easier. Ours is located right off our kitchen.

If you are planning your own mudroom, I highly recommend a brick floor (I wrote about the brick threshold here). These are brick thins, and they pretty much remove any dirt before any feet make it to the kitchen. The great part is that you can’t see how dirty the floor is, even when it really needs to be vacuumed. Win-win.

A bench between the lockers is the perfect perch for putting on shoes.

That cute mailbox is an antique find, and I hung it here as a place to put my outgoing mail so I don’t forget it when I’m leaving the house.

The yellow sconces are vintage, and they cast the perfect warm glow at night. But the row of hooks might be my favorite thing. A few years ago, the 1950s elementary school my son attended was demolished to make way for a new school (you can imagine how I felt about that). Before the demo, parents were invited to purchase items that wouldn’t be used in the new school. That long row of hooks hung in my son’s first-grade classroom. Imagine how many kiddos hung their coats and backpacks here over the years. My cute boy even remembers which hook was his (the sixteenth one from the left!). It’s super functional for when we have company, but I love the sentimentality too. And it cost $4.

The lockers are fir to match the fir floors in the adjacent kitchen. Holes are punched in the uppers for ventilation, which we really need because stinky cleats and football pads are stored inside.

And I can’t say enough good about a Dutch door. When my twins want to play outside, I leave the top part open and can hear all their chattering as they play “friends” (their equivalent of “house”). It’s a good way for me to keep tabs on them when I’ve got stuff to do inside.

P.S. If you get a Dutch door and want an inexpensive slide lock for connecting both parts of the door, take a look at Hobby Lobby. After I bought mine, I saw theirs and wished I would have gotten it instead—affordable and good looking too. •

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