As I wrote in my last article we are currently looking at making our laundry into a mudroom. I included some drawing from my plans for the mudroom in the last article, but I am still looking around at other options, and seeing what other people have done for their mudrooms.

Fine Homebuilding and Fine Woodworking did a “build off” from two of their contributors to build a mudroom bench. The results of both are pretty impressive, and go beyond what I am able to do and am planning to do for our mudroom bench.

It was interesting to see the different approaches that the two contributors had. One of the contributors was a house builder and the other was a furniture and cabinet builder. Their different building techniques and plans for the mudroom benches reflected their varied experiences and skill sets.

Below is the introductory video for the series:

You can read more about the project, check out detailed videos and download the plans over on the Fine Homebuilding web-site.

Update: From what I can tell all the links and plans for the built-in mudroom benches are only available to paid subscribers to Fine Home Building.

 The door to our attached garage goes directly into our laundry room. It’s a decent size room so we are looking at making better use of the room by also using it as a family mudroom.

We already have a decent size shoe rack in the laundry room since it is our most used entrance to the house (post to follow), so now we are looking at adding a mudroom bench and hooks. Since there are five of us we will be building in five different sections and cubby holes in the bench.

The plan is to build the mudroom bench against the wall and then add the wainscotting look to the wall above it. At the moment we are still unsure about what we want to do above the hooks. We have a few options that include putting a narrow shelf above the hooks, leaving it flush like in the drawing, or putting a larger shelf that will be big enough to take more baskets.

The maximum length of the bench will be about eight feet as that is how far I have between the corner of the wall and the door to our under stair storage. We also don’t want it to stick out too much as if it’s too deep it will block the walkway.

Given how slow I’ve been on other projects lately I’m not sure when we will get to this project, but it’s in the planning stages…