{Mudroom Bench}

We have a "mudroom" in our new house...which is really just a hallway where you walk into the house from the garage. It has a half bath on one end of the space, and a closet on the other end.

We had plans to copy the lockers that the builder had offered as an upgrade.  After some time, planning, and consideration, we opted to do something a little differently than we originally thought.  We decided to build a bench, with drawers, and then top it with lockers.  This way we have a place to dump our stuff that filters into the house that you would normally find everywhere, like shoes, bags, and junk from the "outside" world. 
 

This is what our builder offered as an upgrade...and just so you all know...I LOVED them!  But we just couldn't afford them, and Justin said he could do it himself...

 

So here is what we have done so far (and there is more in the works)...

First, we made our bench out of two Hemnes TV consoles.  We just built them and then put them together, side by side up against the wall in our mudroom.  We removed the baseboards on our walls, so we could fit the cabinets against the wall and then bolted them to the wall to make them permanent.  They looked like this (and we had two)...

Please ignore the wood top...I will explain that later. 

Next we used lattice because our baseboards were not high enough to cover the open space below the drawers.  We nailed the lattice to the bottom of the cabinet and to the middle (to hide the two cabinets).

The tops of the cabinets were 18 1/4 in. wide.  So, we used two 1x6 boards and one 1x8 board to create a planked, rustic look to the bench.  We screwed those directly into the Hemnes cabinets.  (Before we attached the boards, we stained them with 4 parts of English Chestnut stain and 1 part Special Walnut to create a close match of our hardwood floors.)

Around the front and side of the bench top, we added 1x2 (pre-stained) to create a "lip" that would hand down and give the bench a finished look.  We used the miter saw to create a mitered corner and just nailed it in place.

We puttied the screw holes, sanded once they had dried, and then added one more light coat of stain to the wood top. 

We then added the baseboards around the bench and painted the whole cabinet with white paint (with added Floetrol) to match the trim.

Here's our progress so far...

We still need to build our lockers, but we are happy with our progress so far.