A little background info:  Steve and I purchased our first home together nearly 8 years ago in Illinois.  It was a 1950’s Cape Cod with red shutters, a leaning one-stall detached garage and leaky basement.  We ‘practiced’ a lot of home improvement in that house including painting, installing new flooring, replacing dated light fixtures, adding crown molding, knocking down part of a wall, updating a powder room to a half bath, demolishing the single car garage and building a 2.5 car garage.  We eventually hired out to get the wet basement fixed.  (Living in concrete dust with a 2-year-old while pregnant is NOT advisable.)  After all was said and done, do you know what we did?!  We sold it… By owner.  In 6 weeks.  In December 2007.  It was a huge relief yet saddening at the same time.  We put a lot into that home but decided a move back to Ohio nearer to our families was important for our growing brood.

Now, we live in a 2-year-old spec home.  While this home offers lots more space and the open floor plan that we love, we have lost some of the character that our dilapidated Cod had like plaster walls, arched doorways, molding and corner windows.  We knew this going into the buy.  I was pregnant and we already had a toddler.  We didn’t want a ‘fixer-upper’.  Move-in ready, here we come!  We could always change out the builder basics over time.

Fast-forward a year-and-a-half to the spring of 2009.  Our youngest had turned 1 and we had a little more freedom.  Steve and I were both feeling the itch to dig into a project again.  My idea?  Turn our cramped hall closet into a makeshift mudroom.

BEFORE:

AFTER:

We had an under-utilized hallway between our garage and kitchen crowded with THREE doors (garage, bathroom and closet). Unlike visitors, we enter/exit through this hallway daily. To set up digs for a mudroom we removed the closet door, widened the doorway and added recessed lighting. Eventually, we’d like wood floors but for now we patched the vinyl after Googling “how-to”. Hubby used a bolt-cutter to cut the wire rack that previously hung lengthwise then hung it up in the corner. (We still need some wooden hangers.) This new room is the hardest working place in our house! We unload backpacks/lunchboxes, put on/remove shoes and even set things to ‘go out’ as a reminder here. In the corner on the floor is where we hide our mongo diaper bag.

Oh, and we did it for $152.  That’s how it all began.