It’s so crazy to me that we’re already on week four of the One Room Challenge sponsored by Better Homes & Gardens! This room has come such a long way since week one from new floors to a new countertop!
This week, I focused on something slightly easier: a new mudroom bench. I originally designed this little mudroom space about three years ago. This was an empty wall with hooks, but again like many spaces in my home, had no storage. Since we primarily use our backdoor to enter our home, we needed a space for our shoes and things.
I had this great idea to build a bench that was tall enough to store rain boots underneath attached to a broom closet all from scratch. The end result was decent, and I remember this being tricky for me at the time. I was so proud of the end result, however I didn’t properly support the bench or fill any of my seams.
There’s something really humbling about building with your own hands. You have to be patient, evaluate, and sometimes accept that you may have failed a little bit, and that’s okay. As long as you’re growing, it’s never a true defeat.
Flash forward to now, when I’ve had many more builds under my belt, I finally realized that I’m done having just a decorative bench that I can’t even sit on. I ripped out the old MDF, which admittedly just about fell out, and cut new pieces to form cubbies. With a combination of wood glue & nails, I built a much sturdier bench with space for practical closed storage. I even went in and filled all my nail holes, and caulked the entire space before priming so that it actually looks like a professionally made space.
For now this space is just primed, until we get to cabinet painting week of the ORC for me. Reviving this past build brought me so much joy, and made me so proud of what I’ve accomplished. Instead of a useless wall in our house, this is now such a bright, happy, & practical corner. Eating that humble pie to go over my own work was completely worth it!
Stay tuned for more transforming of this space, and make sure you’re following along with all of the other extremely talented participants on the One Room Challenge Blog!
bonita by rachel 