Rustic mud room coat hooks DIY

Rustic mud room coat hooks DIY

I’ve always wanted to live in a house with a real mud room. Every house I lived in as a kid never really had one, and all my single-girl apartments… well, I was lucky if they had one bedroom let alone a fancy room just for mud. This house doesn’t have one either. But what it has is a pantry slash laundry room, and now it also has a mud “corner”! I figured the corner of our pantry/laundry room is a perfect place to corral our coats and boots, hats, mittens, umbrellas, and all those things that we’re probably too grown up to just be throwing on a chair in the rumpus room, and since it’s only about three steps from the back door, it’s also really convenient.

Right after Christmas I bought a set of schoolhouse-inspired black iron wall hooks from Restoration Hardware on sale after having looked high and low for something exactly like them. (I have a horrible tendency to invent things in my head that are exactly what I need, only to find that they don’t exist in real life or they’re a million dollars, so I love when I imagine something that I can actually find, and it’s on sale!) I like that these hooks coordinate well with the matte black hardware on our kitchen cabinets (which — spoiler! — we’re going to be incorporating into the pantry bookcases as well). The hooks were backordered until a few weeks ago so we finally got to work over the weekend on our really simple rustic mud room coat hooks.

We figured we might as well use some scrap wood since we’ve been unintentionally collecting quite a bit with all the projects we’ve been doing lately, and since we only needed about 30 inches to fully fill our wall. After looking at a few pieces of newish wood in the garage that didn’t seem right, we then saw a piece of wood that had been part of our barn door headboard, and it was exactly what we wanted. It has tons of character, great color, and I love that it was the original door on our old stable in the back yard, so it kind of belongs to this house. Also, our pantry is so grey, black and white right now, it’s nice to be able to bring some warm color in with this aged wood.

Andy removed all the old nails and cut it down to size.

Then I lightly sanded it with our orbital sander and a fine grit sandpaper, just to get rid of any splinters. We loved how much character, color and shape this piece of wood has, so we definitely didn’t want to sand that away. And yes, it was freeeeezing on Saturday, hence me with my hood up and gloves on. Oh, and yes, apparently I did attach my hood inside out, so thanks for noticing.

We found the studs and screwed the wood directly into the wall, and then attached the hooks to the wood, and yay, our very own mud corner!

This is a difficult room to photograph in because it’s so narrow and there’s no natural light, but here’s the angle looking towards the kitchen.

This is looking in from the kitchen, at an angle. You can’t actually see the coats or hooks when standing in the kitchen, which is nice, because if this area ever tends to get a little messy (which it will, believe me), it won’t be obvious.

I can’t wait to get that window fixed. It’s currently closed up with shutters on the outside, so we’re hoping to be able to remove those and let some light in. My next project is some curtains for this window and the kitchen. We’d also like to add in some storage for hats and mittens, maybe a bench? We have so many projects — and so many possibilities — in this room that a lot of our ideas are in the “wait and see what we need” category, as other projects get done, like adding shelving and counterspace above the washer and dryer.

I’m so happy that we have our own little mud corner now, and that I’ll always know where an umbrella is if I need it. If only we could put away our winter coats for good!

— Kerry