You come home from a long day at work hoping to relax. You kick off your shoes and try to tuck them into a corner, accidentally knocking over a couple coats in the narrow room as you do. As you pick them up, you almost trip over a shoe. We've got some Small Mud Room Ideas to make the area less cramped and make coming home less of a chore.
1) Hallway Mud Room
Your mud room is small, but there are a lot of ways to make it seem bigger. One way to get more space for shoe and coat storage is to extend your mud room into the hallway. You have to be careful with this, of course, since overcrowding a narrow hallway isn't good, either. We'd suggest checking out this narrow hallway mud room design by Annie from DIY Decor Mom to get some inspiration and learn how you can make your own.
2) Shoe Rack Bench
One of the primary purposes of a mud room is to store shoes so that you don't track dirt, dust, or mud all over the house. It's convenient to have coat storage, but ultimately shoes are the one thing that you need to store as soon as you get into the house. We'd suggest getting a good shoe rack that can store as many shoes as possible. A shoe rack like this one with two shelves would be ideal for maximizing shoe storage in a small space, and it has a seat to use while you take your shoes off.
3) Make It Bigger
You can expand some small spaces, but what if you're not willing to give up any of the adjacent rooms? That's okay; you can actually expand your mud room without taking up space in another room by creating a pass-through. By cutting a pass-through into another room, you create more space to stand in and make the area look roomier without taking away space in another room. If your mud room is next to a load-bearing wall, you can use these instructions from This One House to make a pass-through safely.
4) Runner Rug
If your mud room is tiny, you won't have a lot of space to wipe your feet on your way in. You could take off your shoes every time, but that might not be practical for your lifestyle. We'd recommend getting a longer runner rug like this that can extend into the hallway or the next room so that anything you track into the house will get on the rug and not on your floors.
5) Minimize
When people decorate or remodel a small room, they almost always talk about throwing away old things they don't need, but they're usually talking about old clothes and gadgets that take up storage space. You can also think about minimizing the storage containers themselves. For example, a cute basket shaped like a cat may be pretty, but if it doesn't fit your space, you might have to use it somewhere else. Krista from The Happy Housie ran into this very issue, and you can check out her article to see how she improved her space by minimizing unnecessary items.
6) Corner Hall Tree
Corners are probably the least utilized spaces in homes, so finding a way to use your mud room's corners is a good start to maximizing your space. We found this lovely driftwood gray corner organizer on Amazon that could work. If you have windows like the ones in the picture, you can still tuck this into a corner or in an odd space where nothing else fits. This one has a cubby on top for gloves and hats as well as two shoe cubbies, and you can store hats and things on top.
7) Use the Full Wall Height
Generally, small spaces have limited floor space, but the walls are just as tall as anywhere else, and you'll want to make use of them. Instead of having a lot of short organizers, hang things on the wall where you can to save floor space. A lot of wall organizers are designed to be hung at a convenient height but leave a lot of room above them, and in a small mud room, you can't afford to waste that space. To use the entire wall, you can get organizers like this with more than one shelf above the coat hooks.
8) DIY Custom-Fit Closet Cubbies
Cubbies are a popular choice for small mud rooms because they keep things organized and help you use your space in the most practical way possible. If you have the skill or are willing to learn, you can use video tutorials like this one to custom build cubbies that fit your space perfectly. Unlike store-bought cubbies, they won't waste any space if they're an inch or two too small for the area. You can even turn the entire mudroom into a cubby set or convert the whole closet into one.
9) Basket Bench
Having a small mud room doesn't mean that you can't have an attractive one. If you want to create a beautiful or thematic room but can't afford to waste any space, you can get things like this bench with baskets underneath. The baskets fit perfectly under the seat so that they don't take up any extra space, but the woven baskets look a lot prettier than an empty cubby or square, space-saving plastic cubbies. Baskets like these also create an old-fashioned look that will seem more natural in a small space since rooms used to be smaller on average.
10) Small All-In-One Rack
If you're really pressed for space, it might be easiest to just get a small rack that has all your needs in one. This is a lot simpler than trying to customize the whole space and make sure you have every single piece you could want. Instead of piecing together a room, try getting something like this from Amazon. This compact organizer has a built-in place for tall and short shoes, a spot to hang things, and a shelf above, along with a place to sit and take shoes off.
11) Remove Doors
A lot of mud rooms have a closet, and while it probably seems normal for the closet to have a door, it will probably only get in the way. A door will take up extra space since you need to leave room for it to open, and if you have a dedicated mud room, there's no reason to have a covered mud room closet; the room is the closet. You can get rid of the doors like Lora Green describes in this Craftivity Design article.
12) Specialized Hangers
It probably seems like you have a limited amount of hanging space in your closet; after all, the closet can only fit as many clothes as it is wide, right? As it happens, there are ways to increase the amount of clothing you can have on the same closet bar. One of the easiest and most effective ways to use that space is to get a specialized hanger like this scarf, tie, and belt hanger that can hold a lot of things on it so that they don't use up a lot of hangers.
13) Lockers
Lockers might seem like an odd thing to put in your personal space since they're typically a fixture at a gym or pool, but they actually make wonderful and attractive additions to home mud rooms. They can help you stay organized to make the most of your space, and you can get different colored lockers like these so that each person can keep their things organized. If you pick a boxy shape like these lockers from Amazon, then you can fit them tightly against each other to conserve space.
14) Hooks With Covered Cubbies
Since you have limited space, you'll want to fit as much as possible into a small space. If you like to have an organizer with coat hooks and a cubby on top for gloves, you might have found that gloves fall out of the cubby a lot or that you can only fit a couple pairs in it. Having cubbies like these with a lid or something to keep them closed will make it so you can fit more gloves and hats.
15) DIY Lockers with Bench
Lockers are a neat thing to have, and they keep your closet space organized while giving each person in your household their own space. Since you'll need a place like a locker to store your coats and shoes, as well as a place to sit to take shoes off, we suggest building or buying a locker set with a built-in bench. You can use the instructions in this video to build it, and the bench will take up a lot less space than a chair. If you make the lockers yourself, you can customize them to fit your space efficiently.
16) DIY Small Closet Shelving
If you have a little closet attached to your mud room and need an efficient way to store things in it, we found a tutorial that should help you out. You can use these instructions by Erin from The DIY Nuts to create a well-organized mud room closet or even tweak their design to fit your needs. Think about what you use your closet for the most; do you have tall boots, or do you wear a different hat every day of the week?
17) Coat Hooks with Dual Hooks
Since you have a tight space, you probably have a few coats on each hanger, but you might've found that jackets fall off a lot, and you often have to take one coat off to get the jacket underneath it. Or, maybe each person in your household has one coat in the entryway and stores the rest in their room. This isn't an ideal setup, so we'd recommend a set of coat hooks like this one from Amazon, in which each hook has two spots to hang things on. This way, you don't have to shift things around as often.
18) Wall Magnets
A keyholder is a common thing to keep in an entryway. It's typically a bowl or other container that you can just toss things in, but in your small entry room, you might not be able to fit a bowl or anything like that. We found this neat magnetic wall-mounted key holder. The great thing about this is that you can put your keys on it almost as quickly as you can toss them in a bowl instead of taking the time to hang them up on a lanyard or a small keyring.
19) DIY Storage Bench
Storage is probably the most valuable thing to look for when designing or fixing a small mud room, so ideally, every piece of furniture will have some kind of storage in it. There's not a lot of furniture in most mud rooms, but one furniture piece that would be nice is a bench to sit on when you take off your shoes. Usually, this would take a lot of space, but if you build one like the one in this mud room remodel, it won't waste much space because it'll also have storage in it.
20) Sliding Door
One of the best space-savers out there is the sliding door. Sliding doors function as well as a regular one in terms of hiding things and keeping dust out, but they don't take up as much room. Unlike traditional doors, they don't need space to swing outward, and while they typically need space to slide, there are ways around this. You can get a mud room bench like this one from Amazon that has a single sliding door so that one of the storage areas will be covered at a time. This way, you have some privacy without swinging doors.
21) IKEA
IKEA is often an ideal place to go for space-saving things because you can build customized furniture without a lot of carpentry know-how. Their pieces tend to be on the boxy side so that they don't waste space with cute swirls and rounded edges and designs, and you can find a tutorial for most IKEA hack projects. We found one IKEA hack video that should help you create a mud room while in a small space.
22) DIY Pegs
A lot of mud rooms involve cubbies, but not everybody is a big fan of cubbies for storage. If you're more focused on storing jackets, purses, and other things that are easier to hang, then you'll need to make a functional peg setup so that you can access everything you need. We found this advice from Grace in my Space for people designing a mud room with a lot of hanging space in a small room.
23) Large Hooks
One of the more annoying issues that you could run into in a small mud room is the tendency to knock things over by accident. You're in a confined space, and it's easy to bump into a wall with some heavy coast or hats hanging on it. To prevent this, we'd recommend getting big hooks like these from Amazon so that it'll be harder to knock things off them. It may seem unnecessary, but this little solution can make a huge difference.
24) Wall-Mounted Catchall
One thing that most people have in a mud room or somewhere when they first enter their home is a catchall. Catchalls are useful containers where you can empty your pockets and not worry about sorting everything out right away, but if you don't have enough room for a small table or surface to use, your options are limited. We found this wall-mounted container from Amazon that should be perfect for a tiny mud room catchall container.
What issues have you run into when designing your mud room? Everybody has different needs, and we're curious about yours. We'd love to hear about them in the comments below.