For an often overlooked space in a house, the quiet mudroom sure does a lot of the heavy lifting when it comes to keeping the chaos of the day at bay. The stray coat here, the scattered boots there, the barrage of backpacks, the forgotten grocery bags and just stuff from day to day life. Barring a designated storage spot, these things so often find their way onto the floor, or worse, trickle into the adjoining kitchen or living room.
These days it’s easily one of the most asked for remodels we get. But when you work in older neighborhoods as we do, you’re forced to work with what you’ve got, and older floor plans rarely provide enough space for a mudroom. So we often find ourselves having to get pretty creative during a remodel. We filtered through the archives and found a few categories for the kinds of mudrooms we tend to end up designing.
First up, the popular mudroom-laundry combination. Who doesn’t want a readily accessible laundry room that doesn’t require expeditions into the dingy, cold, underground?
A few years ago, we took this concept a step beyond the mudroom-laundry combination, and in a 1940s Old Sagamore home we added an office component as well. It’s one of my favorite projects. More like a multi-purpose mudroom. We took a very small bedroom off the garage – originally a “maid’s room” – and used every inch of it.
Of course, we’re not always tasked with adding an additional function to the room. Every once in a while we find ourselves designing a traditional mudroom in its purest form. Can’t beat it. Built-in cabinets. Cubbies. Bench seating.
But not every house has enough space for anything like this. Sometimes we have to just sneak in some cabinets where we can and call it a day.
And other times, the most effective mudroom of all has nothing more than some simple hooks on the wall! So from the single entryway with wall hooks to the multi-purpose mudroom there is no denying the versatility of the mudroom- our first line of defense against the onslaught of the daily tedium.
