A Whole New Entryway

When we reorganized the garage early this spring and could finally fit my car in there, we stopped using the front door altogether and did all our coming and going through the garage. The hubs parks his truck in the driveway but he uses his garage door opener to come in that way. Suddenly, the piano bench I've had in our entryway was a little obsolete; there was nowhere to put our keys, nowhere to drop my purse, and nowhere for the hubs to dump his hats, badge, etc. It was all getting dumped on my kitchen island, which didn't make me too happy.

I took a look at the little walkway that had become our new entryway, and tried to see if I could fix the situation.

My apologies for the bar stool that is in the foreground...It seems that at the time this picture was taken I had been using the bar stool as a stand for my laptop so I could listen to a movie while painting something (I'm almost always painting something).

So this is what I was working with, though. The basement stairs railing is to the left as you walk through the kitchen doorway, so there's just enough space in between the railing and the walkway for a narrow table or bench. I tried the piano bench we already had in the original entryway, and it was too wide, so it would need to be a really narrow table or bench. I also needed a place for us to hang coats and such, since the kitchen island bar stools weren't my favorite choice for that either.

I kept my eyes peeled for a cheap table or bench, and couldn't have been more excited when I noticed during a trip to visit my parents that their old entryway table was being stored in my childhood bedroom because they had no use for it anymore. It was narrow enough, and it was free. Score and score.

I love wood pieces in our house but after spending so many hours painting all the wood in that room white I couldn't leave this guy his original wood. We decided on Behr's Bicycle Yellow paint, a bright yellow that's enough on the paler side to not be too obnoxious.

When I put the first coat on, I thought for one of the first times ever that we had made a horrible mistake with paint choice. I was already pretty invested at this point though so I put the second coat on and was happy with the end result.

And it's a perfect fit in that space! Doesn't stick out into the walkway, doesn't hang over the end of the railing and into the walkway to the rest of the room...I literally couldn't have custom made a table that fit more perfectly. It needed a little bit of organization, though, because just tossing things haphazardly onto the top of that table would probably send our items over the edge, through the railing and to the concrete basement floor below.

I took a small wooden bowl off of my bookshelves - it hadn't been serving any purpose other than decorative - to hold our keys, and added a plant for aesthetics. The plant is struggling...but then so are all my plants. The basket on the shelf below held dog leashes until we got the coat rack set up; it will hold winter hats and gloves now. The plastic basket on the ground holds our shoes. I get really annoyed with shoes scattered in plain sight, and just having them all lined up under the table would make it hard to clean the floors. I found this basket at Home Depot for $10, and it's perfect; it's big enough to hold multiple pairs of shoes and the fact that it's plastic means that it will hold up well against dirty shoes. It will also be easy to clean.

Now for the coat rack. We have a open stalled barn in our backyard that we use for wood storage, and the hubs fantasizes about burning it down someday after he's built a new barn in a more ideal location in the yard. I snagged some boards from the walls of the barn and painted them for the structure of the coat rack. I considered leaving them wood but decided against it for the same reason that I painted the table, as well as the fact that the grayed hue of the wood didn't pop very much off of the dark gray walls. I wanted the yellow table to be the only significant color pop - didn't want to have color overload in such a small space - so I painted the boards the same white as the trim and the railings I had painted.

It took three coats but they went quick the wood looks good by the end of it. Next, I needed knobs. I went to Hobby Lobby, which thankfully had a 50% off sale on knobs and drawer pulls so I was able to get $50 worth of knobs for $25. Not too shabby; it made it a lot more fun since I didn't feel like I had to skimp on fun knobs to save money.

How fun are they? I figured that with two boards, five knobs per board made sense. The two big brown knobs aren't actually knobs at all; they're finials from a curtain rod we used in our old house that I kept just in case I could use them someday. At that point, all we had to do was figure out what layout of knobs I wanted and have the hubs do all the hanging. (Captain helped.)

And the finished product?

We decided to put the rack on the bottom down there as more of a long term plan, so our kids can hang their own coats and bags as well. In the meantime, I like how it fills the wall and adds some interest to the whole space. With the racks up, I was able to move my purse and the dog leashes to their new homes, off the table.

When this project was just a figment of my imagination and not in real life yet, I had worried about whether hanging coats and such on such a shallow wall would impede the walkway. I really didn't want that, but I took the gamble and hoped it would work out okay. It's awesome that it's now up and I can see that that won't be a problem.

I love it! Such small and easy changes to make such a huge difference in the functionality of our home.