We don’t have a dedicated mudroom in our house, and our garage door—our main entry—opens directly into the kitchen. During our big kitchen remodel we created a compact mudroom solution by installing tall cabinets with doors right next to the garage door. They function like lockers but look much nicer and keep clutter hidden. If you have a small entry area, cabinetry with doors is a great way to get mudroom storage without taking extra square footage. After living with these “mudroom lockers” for over two years, we discovered a few simple tweaks that made them far more effective for our family.
(Sherry’s shoes, jeans, fleece, and a similar purse are shown.)
Our Mudroom Cabinetry Set-Up
To orient you: the cabinet pair sits directly beside the garage door in our kitchen. During the renovation we weighed multiple floor plan options, and adding these cabinets ended up being one of the most useful decisions we made. The lockers keep shoes, jackets, backpacks, purses, gloves, and hats right by the door while staying out of sight. It’s a dramatic upgrade from our previous approach, where shoes were dumped into a big basket in the middle of the kitchen and coats were hung in a closet farther away.
Our mini mudroom consists of two floor-to-ceiling cabinets, each with two doors, giving each family member their own side or “locker.” The kids’ side has hooks for jackets and backpacks and a bin below for shoes. It gets messy sometimes, but it’s highly functional for them. Tip: we keep a small basket of socks with their shoes so they don’t have to run back upstairs to find socks in the morning.
Above the kids’ lockers we store seasonal items—scarves, hats, and gloves—in labeled bins in the overhead cabinets. When winter arrives we bring them down; the rest of the year they stay tucked away and organized up top.
Identifying Our Organization Issue
Our side of the locker had the original layout for two years: hooks, a shelf, and shoe baskets. Over time that arrangement stopped working well. Our coats got longer and bunched at the bottom when they hit the shelf instead of hanging freely. The shoe bins were too small or awkward: some held only three pairs and became crowded, while the kids’ shoes sometimes slid out. The system that fit the kids didn’t suit the adults.
You might think the solution was simply to move the shelves, but the shelves were set at the highest and lowest pre-drilled holes in the cabinet. After a big renovation, drilling extra holes wasn’t appealing. We left it as is—until a couple of years later when it finally felt like an easy weekend project.
Adding More Shelving Storage
We marked the new shelf placement with painter’s tape to protect the cabinet finish and prevent veneer splintering. Instead of buying a shelf-pin template, we matched the drill bit to an existing hole and marked drilling depth with tape so we wouldn’t go through the cabinet side. This method produced holes that matched the pre-drilled ones in size and depth.
We purchased replacement shelf pegs from the hardware store—different brands than the originals, but affordable and sturdy—and added two new holes on each side at the bottom and another set up top. Raising the top shelf allowed us to move the hooks higher so coats could hang freely, and creating two lower shelves gave us space for two rows of shoes instead of a single crowded bin. We used an extra cabinet shelf we had in the attic, but plywood cut to size would work as well.
Tip: we keep charcoal odor-absorbing bags in the cabinet to eliminate shoe smells. They’re easy to maintain—just air them in the sun occasionally and then return them to the shelf.
Maximizing Mudroom Function
The change may seem small, but adding extra shelving drastically improved functionality. Removing the shoe bins and using two shelves allows adults to store and access more footwear easily. Sherry can now keep most of her regular shoes in the mudroom (seven pairs), eliminating frequent trips to the bedroom closet. I can fit my three go-to pairs too, even though they’re larger.
Raising the top shelf created useful real estate above the hooks for items we access daily: a bowl for keys and wallet, a small mail or gift-card organizer, the alarm pad, and the dog leash. We also mounted a cedar panel at the top to keep the cubbies smelling fresh—there’s another cedar panel on the kids’ side as well.
This modest update reminded us that living with a space for a while helps you learn what needs to change. It’s fine to be tired after a big project and postpone small tweaks; when you finally get to them, the payoff can be very satisfying. Even our dog, Burger, seemed to approve of the calm, organized entry space—he hovered nervously when we tested leaving the house, just to make sure we weren’t actually going anywhere.
We also like to display favorite photos inside the cabinet doors from our custom page-a-day family calendar. It’s a simple, daily way to enjoy shared memories and spark conversations. Each January we rotate new photos in and save the previous year’s favorites in a memory box.
Small changes—like drilling a few new holes for shelf pegs and raising a shelf—can make a compact mudroom far more usable. If you have a similar locker-style cabinet near your entry, consider adjusting shelf heights and hook placement to fit the coats and footwear you actually use. Those small adjustments add up to a calmer, more organized home.
- Kitchen Remodel Chapter 1: Floor Planning
- Kitchen Remodel Chapter 2: Demo & Rebuilding
- Kitchen Remodel Chapter 3: The Big Reveal
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