when we moved into the new house, one of the things we gave up from our old house was a mudroom. yes, it got completely cluttered in the old house, but it was super nice to have our hub where the boys kept their coats + backpacks, where i could keep my purse, where shoes were kept for the whole family. one of the first things i wanted to re-work in the new house was to get a more functional space put together for keeping all of the things that a young family like ours needs when we grab-and-go!

the coat closet: before

the new house has a coat closet that is right next to the entryway from the garage. it’s your standard coat closet, with the single white wire shelf with the coat bar attached. nothing fancy. after five months of wrangling all of our stuff into that closet, i had a (kind of) meltdown and it was off to menards we went! mr. re-nest + i had had lots of discussions about how we were going to make this closet functional for us, and it finally just took a super easy sketch and a visit to menards to figure it all out.

given what we wanted, we figured out it was going to take some customization on our part (nothing that was pre-made was going to work in the space without wasting a lot of space). and, we knew that white metal closet shelf/bar thing was coming out of the closet!

what we ended up doing: first, i repainted the closet white (because it needed it!). mr. re-nest then cut three custom shelves for the closet (two on bottom and one on top) and painted them a nice, pretty, clean white. i also became obsessed with the idea of adding removable wallpaper to the backwall of the closet to add something pretty to it (i used the scott living peel-and-stick wallpaper from lowes, which was fine. it did stretch a lot when putting it on the wall, which made matching the pattern up really tricky, and honestly not perfect.) after the shelves were added in (with extra supports to handle the weight of backpacks, purses, and bags, we added in a new chrome closet rod to hang the coats. so, the closet bar is up kind of high (too high for our youngest to reach), but the closet is waaayy tall and there was so much wasted space. so, having the bar up high is fine and no. 2 will eventually be able to reach it!

what do you think? i love the closet, even though the door is always shut and it’s not an open mudroom. the organization works so well for us, and it makes me happy to see it so clean and put together (because i’m a clean-freak like that!)