Spruce Up Your Entryway with These Practical yet Beautiful Ideas

Home foyers and entries are the places in the home where you shed your coat, shoes, and belongings, shaking off the dust from your travels. Its where you transition from a place of high activity to more of a place of rest. Which is why its important to have a space to contain that dirt and dust and hold your outdoor attire for another day: a mudroom.

Mudrooms are becoming more commonplace in homes of today, especially since theyve transitioned from a space of utility to a more stylish feature of the home. With entryway furniture such as a mudroom bench, coat racks, and cubbies, the space combines style and functionality in a way that is unique to the house its built in.

Spruce up your entryway with these mudroom ideas.

 

Front Entryway

One way to spruce up an entry is by adding details. Say you have an foyer with a coat closet. Adding an interesting door to the closet brings interest to an otherwise mundane spot.

Of course, a coat closet is a useful item for a front closet, especially when visitors arrive. You dont have to gather coats and take them to a spot where guests will have to sort through them later. You just hang up the coats in the nearby closet, and the outerwear is easy to retrieve at the end of the day.

If you dont have a coat closet, you can makme do with a coat rack – a vintage one makes things interesting – and/or a bench with nearby coats hooks.

 

Entryway Bench

Take a glance at many of HGTV Joanna Gaines’s decor plans, and youre sure to see this feature in the front entryway of many of her designs.

The entryway bench provides a quick space for residents and guests alike to take a seat while pulling on their boots to head out into the world. Some of these benches provide cubbyholes that the owner can use for baskets of gloves and hats, storage for shoes, or a quick stash of gardening supplies.

The bench could simply be an arrangement of entryway furniture or a customized built-in – the possibilities are vast and varied from DIY projects to a personalized project.

A variance to the simple mudroom bench is the bench with board-and-batten  or raised-anel backdrop, with a few coat hangers spaced evenly above. This provides even more storage during cold and rainy seasons, where your coat and shoes are all well within reach and stylishly add to the inviting warmth of the entry.

 

Mudroom Lockers

No, these arent the lockers that you used to stash your textbooks (and other items) in high school – although they could be. Mudroom lockers usually contain a bench of some sort and coat racks, although the coat racks are divided with a board to designate the space as separate.

 

Typically used in larger homes with families, these separate lockers provide a designated space so all of Jimmys supplies are easily accessible right when he needs them. This not only saves the house from a lot of mud and wet footprints but also saves Jimmys parents searching time because the backpack finally has a designated space.

The appeal of mudroom lockers is that they take up very little space and can thus be placed in a back laundry room or rear entry without using prime living areas.

 

 

Hall Station

This style is perfect for homes with long hallways in a discrete section of the house. Cabinetry, benchs, shelving, coat racks and more may line the wall of the hallway, making use of space that might otherwise be wasted.

In this type of mudroom, one enters through a rear entrance where they take a seat on the entryway bench, removing their shoes and other belongings to store until a future time. There may even be shelves above the coat racks to provide extra space and storage for the homeowner. Becuase of the location, it would not be unusal for this kin of setup to be located near the laundry room.

 

Mudroom Must-Haves

There are a few things that every mudroom (whether tucked away in a hallway or featured at an entry) must have to be functional.

1. Easy-to-Clean Flooring

They call it a mudroom for a reason—its going to be muddy. As well as wet, cold, and even a bit smelly at times. Rather than track the outdoors in onto carpet or difficult-to-clean rugs, make sure the floor itself is made  from a durable, waterproof material.

Flooring for mudrooms include tile, sealed wood flooring, or even laminate. Many homes also create a concrete flooring with a lot of success. Whatever flooring you use, your top priority should be easy-to-clean.

 

2. Storage Space

One of the perks of having a mudroom is finally having the space to drop off your outdoor attire without getting the rest of the house dirty and cluttered. For this reason, youll want to have ample storage space to hold your coats, shoes, and whatever else youll need for your outdoor adventures.

You dont have to have all of this in the form of built-ins, however. You can use simple baskets and bins from Target or other home goods stores to hold your galoshes and gloves. In fact, bins and baskets could be just what your space needs to make the mudroom feel like the rest of the house.

 

3. Close to a Closet

Theres no need to store out-of-season items in the open, however. Be sure to have a coat closet close by to store mittens and wooly things in the summer, and beach pails and sandals in the winter. Having a closet close by helps to keep all of the same types of equipment in the same general area, so you dont have to go searching for your heavy winter coat the first time it snows.

 

Nice-to-Have: Near a Laundry Room

For climates that are particularly susceptible to icky weather, youll want a washer and dryer close by to cut back on stains. Imagine coming in from a day of yard work and dropping your clothes in the washer on the way to the shower. In a house like this one below, you can do just that.

 

If youre looking to take your mudroom dreams to the next level, then youll surely want to take a closer look at the suggestions weve brought to you – and browse the many plans with mudrooms that we have to offer.