I've always wanted a mud room. I actually had something closely resembling a laundry/mud room in one home we rented once. But we only lived there for 8 months, and only had three children back then.
The more children we have, the more I have found a need for a mud room type space to store things like coats, shoes, boots, mittens, backpacks, diaper bags, etc. Our current home has nothing resembling a mud room, and our laundry is in the garage, so no laundry room either. But we have improvised.
We have been blessed with a two-car garage, that is too small to fit either of our vehicles. The home was originally built with a very long garage, but the back half of the garage was converted into our master suite by previous owners. Our large van is too tall to even fit in the door, and even our mini-van is too long for the shortened garage.
So, since our garage is unusable to park in, we have used it to create a make-shift mud-room.
We started with shelving units that came with the house, and laid carpet scraps down to create a cozy, and semi clean floor. The bench used to be in our dining area, and we still may use it there again someday, but it's not needed now, so it functions better in the mud-room.
On the far left of this photo you can see the door into the dining area, my long winter coat hanging from the side of the shelving unit, and then the area for my husband's and my coats. There are six hooks (the same kind holding the kids' towels in their bathroom) that we use to hang our coats, jackets & sweaters. My husband lines most of his shoes up on the bottom shelf, and my shoes are lined up on the upper shelf.
On the right, you can see the spaces for our two youngest. Each child has two double hooks and three baskets in their section, plus shelf space above. In the winter, the hooks hold jackets, backpacks and snow coats. In the summer, they hold swim floats, sweaters, and backpacks.
We have the kids lined up in age order, with the youngest closest to my husband and me. The older ones don't need help getting their shoes on, so we put them farther away.
Here is our oldest daughter's section. She has a sweater, a jacket, a coat, and her backpack hung on the hooks. Her snow boots are on the bottom shelf under her hooks (and her sister's boots are also in her space...it happens). Her tennis shoes are in the red basket on the bottom shelf. In the bottom left corner you can see our second daughter's tennis shoes in her blue basket.
The kids also each have two hanging baskets. The lower basket for each of them contains socks. I've mentioned before that we tend to go barefoot in the house. My kids much prefer to be barefoot, and if they attempt to wear socks in the house, we end up with them under beds, stuffed into the couch, etc. The kids don't put socks on until they are putting shoes on to go outside, so it makes sense to store the socks with the shoes. This is also why we have a laundry bucket in the garage to collect dirty socks as they take them off when they take their shoes off to come in.
The upper basket holds seasonal or personal items. Currently my oldest has her winter gloves in the basket. I think she also has a wallet with her money in this basket too. In summer this basket holds swim goggles and in the fall it holds her shin guards and soccer socks.
The shelf space above is used for Sunday shoes and other personal items that don't fit so well in the upper basket. We have found that it is best to keep the Sunday shoes out of the way so they are not worn and lost, and so we can all easily find them when we are leaving for church. When we get home from church, or another fancy event, we make sure everyone's dress shoes are put back on the shelf, and the kids are not allowed to wear them at any other time.
Ideally, I would love to have fancy, built-in locker type spaces for each of my kids. And with doors to hide the clutter...but we do the best with what we have. As I mentioned above, these shelving units came with our house, I bought the hooks cheap at Target, and the baskets were pretty cheap at Ikea. Also, since our kids are pretty short, we can't do taller, skinnier spaces yet, so this takes up a lot of horizontal space.
While this mud room space is less than my dream space, it has functioned beautifully and mostly unchanged since we move in to our current home a year and a half ago. If it works, don't change it. :)
Tomorrow I'll share the rest of our garage.
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