I’m slowly catching up to what we’re organizing.  This week I’m showcasing our mudroom.  One of the things on my list that was what I considered a “luxury” was a mudroom.  A place to drop our things and was out of the way.  Well, imagine my delight when we looked at this house and saw a nook right beside the garage door!  From the moment the contract was signed I started plotting what I was going to do with the space.  And I’ve done it.

But first, we had to get our ducks in a row.  I decided this space would be our big paint project for the month.  And picking out colors is now starting to drive me bonkers a bit!  But I did it.

Here’s the befores:

 The bench was a coffee table and something else I can’t remember.  I used an old crib mattress that was falling apart to provide cushion and then we added baskets underneath for storage.  At our old house it was the shoe cubby and worked great (when the kids put their shoes up).  We purchased the cheaper cubby type shelves from Lowe’s for shoe storage at our new house.  I had thought about putting in baskets but then remembered that the kids typically may pull the baskets out and put the shoes in but then they would forget to put the baskets up.  I don’t want more stuff to step around.

This is the message center.  It holds our jurisdiction list, chore list and buddy responsiblities (I’ll share more on those later if ya’ll want…just let me know).  We also have a place for prayer cards for missionaries.  And there are hooks for keys, dog leashes etc.  Hopefully, by next year I’ll have something more like this:

And all my organized friends just drooled. Me too. I hear ya.

Anyway, back to the mudroom.  Here are the afters:

 Crimson and gray!  Roll Tide!  I had my eye on some pretty Alabama fabric for the bench but when we got to the store it was $10 a yard.  I quickly realized that spending $20 on recovering a bench was not worth it and this fabric at under $4 would work just fine (it was 60% off).  I’m thrilled with how it all came together.  It helps that I took the fabric and matched it to the paint!  This is coming out of the half bath.

 My beautiful bench.  That sucker is over ten years old.  We got it from Big Lots when we first moved to this area.