Easy Mud Room Cubbies
4 Materials
$100
1 Day
Easy
To give us plenty of space for coats, shoes, hats, and gloves we decided to add 3 cubbies next to the door. We built them completely outside as a single unit, carried it inside, screwed it to the studs and that was it! Well except for the painting/staining/polycrylic. The building and installing parts only took a few hours.
My husband is a SolidWorks nerd so he drew the cubbies on his computer. This enabled us to get the dimensions just right. We were trying to use as much of the space between the corner and the window as possible, while still having decent-sized cubbies.
My husband used a router to cut two slots in some fancy plywood for each shelf and it worked out really well. This way there were no screws or nails involved. The shelves fit so snugly, we had to gently hammer them into place.
You can see the shelves are offset for the middle cubby, to prevent the wood from getting too thin where the slots were cut.
After the frame was pounded into place, we just screwed some tongue and groove boards to the back, which really stiffened the whole thing up. We also cut a hole for an outlet and a switch with a Fein tool (which is absolutely my favorite addition to our tool collection)!
Here is the space where the cubbies will go. I wish we had more room! I would prefer to have 4 cubbies, but 3 will do.
We would have made them wider but the outlet below the window limited us.
The most tedious part of this whole project was taping and staining the back boards. I really wish I had done this before we attached them to the frame. I used a walnut stain and applied it with a foam brush and wiped the excess off with a clean rag. The rag also gave it a more realistic weathered look.
We wanted the walnut color to match the walnut bench and shelves we have in the same room. It ended up darker than the real walnut, but I still like it. Lastly I painted the sides Behr Greige with 2 coats and added polycrylic on the tops of the shelves so they'd be easy to clean.
Well the two of us have managed to use up all 3 cubbies after about 1 day haha. I love their functionality and the way the look! They take up a surprisingly small amount of space for all of the stuff they hold.
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