While you may hear a lot about mudrooms in home design forums these days, they are definitely not a new trend and they are not only meant for rustic or farmhouse style homes.
In this post I will share the mudroom I designed for our home, and tips for designing one in your home. I must start by saying that this is definitely a space that I would recommend you hire an interior designer for. Depending on whether you are renovating an existing space or creating it from scratch, a designer can help you with the best design for your family. However, if you are an avid DIYer with a knack for functional design, then perhaps these tips can help guide you a bit.
Define your “WHY”
Why does your home need this space? Not all homes do – and you can definitely get by without this dedicated space. Our old home didn’t have one, but simply different entry points. While I would have loved to have one, the design of the home did not allow it and would require significant re-structuring or an addition.
In our new (old) home, we only had one entry, right at the front of our house, but without a type of foyer – you basically opened the door and were in the living room with a clear view of our master bedroom. While fine for guests (of course we keep our bedroom door closed) this didn’t really work for us with school & sports equipment bags going in and out of the house – and jackets and winter gear from a family of 5. When guests did come over, it was hard to have a space for them to put their things as we were so over loaded. Plus the traffic would take its tool on our living room over time, which is really meant to be the heart of our home. Furthermore, in order to get to the main access points of the house, you had to go through the living room, dining room (which are not open concept) to get to the kitchen, second floor, basement, basically everywhere important.
The location of our mudroom is at the back of our home, next to a “hub” space that connects the kitchen, powder room, dining room and second floor – so coming in this space, brings you to a more central location, leaving our living room with less traffic. It was also designed as part of our backyard pool project – so that we wouldn’t have everyone coming through the kitchen from the pool, which led to slippery floors in our last house.
Leveraging Current Spaces
Do you already have a space that can be converted? If so, this is usually the most cost effective way to create the space, but not always the easiest. Sometimes starting from scratch gives you the most flexibility to create exactly what you want and need. We chose the former. We already had a 8’x11′ room that was really too small to do much with. In addition, it had an opening on every wall: a 5′ entry to the “hub”, a door to the dining room, a window to the exterior side and then a patio door about 12″ off the floor and leading to literally a 6-7′ drop to the backyard. While not perfect for all our mudroom goals, it did allow us to create the space we needed in a fairly cost effective manner.
Swipe through the above pictures to see the first part of the transformation.
We had the patio door changed to a double garden door brought down to the floor and built a deck outside that door that would lead to the backyard (pool) and to the side of the house to our vehicles. This was actually part of our backyard project and was part of how we designed the location of the pool and patio. We wanted to ensure our backyard design was conducive to the traffic flowing in and out through the mudroom. And that was really the only major structural change for us to convert the space.
But as I mentioned, not making more structural changes did limit the full potential of the space. Because we kept all the existing openings, it did limit our storage capacity – and some of the elements on my design “wish list”. Originally, I wanted to have a small beverage station in there for easy access to drinks and snacks from the backyard. We also thought about putting laundry in the space, or a closet – but keeping the openings didn’t leave us enough space for anything except the necessary storage. But in the end, I also wasn’t willing to change the configuration of other rooms to have more space or extend the house.
Determining Storage Needs
How many people are you in the house? What type of climate are you in? How much storage do you need in the space? It’s important to ensure you at least cover your storage needs, otherwise, you will need to find alternatives outside the mudroom which will negate the purpose of having this space.
We are a family of 5 and need quite a bit of space – especially in the winter. Between jackets and snowpants, mittens, hats and scarves, then of course school bags – that alone can fill a wall. Not to mention the storage required for snowy boots. Then of course there are all the adult coats to store, and then room to have regular shoes. We also needed to be able to move around the space with hockey bags, dogs, ski gear, and more.
So we kept it simple to ensure we had the room to move inside the room. We used a shoe cabinet for our nicer shoes and mats under the benches and hooks for the boots. All jackets and pants go on hooks and we have a small basket on the floor for toques and mittens. We also have one tall but narrow cabinet with an mirrored door to keep everything else that is required on a day to day basis. In the summer, storage needs will definitely be reduced, but that’s when we will use the hooks to keep extra towels at hand for by the pool, along with hats and umbrellas.
In terms of seating, we opted to use two benches along one wall instead of building something in. It was more in our budget and gives us the flexibility to change based on our needs.
Deciding on Materials
This of course will be mostly aligned to your design concept, which hopefully matches with the style of the rest of your home. But the one thing I do recommend is to ensure you pick materials that are durable. This space will be super high traffic and it will take its toll on the materials you use. You will want to ensure they can stand the test of time. Beyond that, you really just need to have your design reference.
For our mudroom, I looked to Pinterest and Instagram to find inspiration, to which you can see here. But my biggest inspiration for the overall look was this image – which I would love to credit, but can’t for the life of me find the original owner. What I took from this was the colour palette and the wainscotting design as the base – I wanted the light an airy look while integrating in some wood accents with touches of black.
For our floor, we choose to use natural slate. Not only for the look (which matches the slate on our kitchen backsplash) but also for its texture. Knowing that this space will likely get wet in the summer and winter, it was important to ensure that the tiles would not create the risk of people slipping on them. I also know how this area would get dirty and there is nothing I hate more than cleaning dirty grout lines. So black slate with charcoal grout it was.
We also chose to do wainscoting on the walls with natural pine. We knew we were going to keep the light, off-white colour that is used in the rest of the house, but without texture on the walls, this could not only get a bit boring, but also show any small nick or scuff. The wood and texture will hide more. We used the existing moulding on the doors and baseboards, and capped the wainscoting with similar style moulding.
Et Voila! We do still have a few cosmetic things to finish when we finally have some time. But other than that, the space is complete and super functional for our lives. It gives us the space and storage we need and we finally have a place that we don’t have to stress about ruining with the elements.
Do you have a mudroom in your home? I would love to hear about yours in the comments below.
Leave a Reply