Before & After: We have a (Finished!) Coat Closet!

When we shared our laundry room before and afters, so many people wondered, well…what's on the other side of the room? Oh you mean on the other side of this??

(See all the before and afters of the laundry room here) We conveniently left those pictures out, because, well, it looked like this:

Avert your poor eyes! But no longer! We had to move our laundry room before we started the kitchen, because a big part of the kitchen plans was adding a walk-in pantry. The pantry that I mentioned last week we were going to finish this weekend, but we decided to knock out the coat closet area instead. We just needed a shorter, faster, nearly mindless project I guess.

I want to rewind a little further in time, because although the above photo is what the other side of the new laundry room looked like earlier this summer, it originally looked like this when we moved in two years ago:

Behind me in this photo is the 4th bathroom that we tore out and converted to the laundry room. To the right leads to the garage (now the black door you see in the after photos) and that closet on the right might look like a coat closet, but it was actually just full of shelves like a linen closet would be. For the past two years, this space has been evolving. Below, you can see how over the past couple months everything finally took shape.

The recessed wall of the fridge became the perfect spot for Charly's raised feeding bowls (check out the DIY here) and a mirror and the extra space behind it became the coat closet we've been pining for for two years.

Through the garage is where we normally enter the house so a spot for keys and a place to hang coats has been on our wish list for some time. Saturday, we tackled everything from adding baseboards, doorknob, painting the walls , and making the interior of the closet actually function.

With such a warm, but white, room we thought the closet would be such a fun and unexpected place to add some color. I had some paint left over from when we painted our bedroom the first time, Valspar's Flannel Gray from Ace, and it is the perfect moody blue.

I painted the shelf (and the little support boards we used to hang the shelf) all the same color since it is a small space and chopping it up with too many different finishes would look unsettled. We hung a simple oil rubbed bronze bar we picked up at Lowe's and filled it with wooden hangers (also from Lowe's) for warmth and to tie into the countertop on the laundry side of things.

We stashed three canvas bins (Lowe's again) up top to hold our hats, scarves/gloves and bags respectively. We're ready for you, cold weather! (not really)

The mirror and key holder are both from Target. A coat closet seems like such a simple thing, but this has made us feel so happy! We have a closet! We have a space to hang our keys. And Charly has a permanent place to chow down (we promise we won't move it again, pup!). We always strive for our home to be as functional and practical as it is beautiful and this is another major step in that direction.

I'll end with this photo of how the laundry room/garage entry correlates with the kitchen. I'm going to do better at trying to share more of these kinds of angles, because although it should be obvious to me, sometimes I forget that you all aren't here and don't necessarily understand how everything flows. I'm also have a video tour on deck for this fall, so look forward to that, too! This space is officially a wrap!