DIY Entryway Bench With Cubbies For Storage

Hey everybody, welcome back to my channel. Today I'm going to take what was the laundry room and turn it into this mud room. So stay tuned and check it out. I'll start by making the bench. For this I ripped some 3 quarter inch plywood to width using the table saw. Then I used my table saw sled to cut the strips of plywood to length for the legs of the bench. With the first piece cut to size, I used it to mark out the next pieces instead of measuring each time. In total I needed 4 of these pieces. Then I could cut the top for the bench to length. For this I should have used my circular saw instead of the table saw sled as this would have been a little bit safer. But this gave me motivation to build an extension wing for the table saw. After checking to make sure the top would fit snugly in place, I began laying out where the legs of the bench would get mounted. And just a quick tip, if you need to divide a piece like this into equal parts but the overall length isn't easily divisible, just angle the tape measure until you find a number that is easily divisible and make your marks. So for example, I needed this top divided into 3 equal parts, but the overall length was 68.5 inches, so not very easily divisible by 3. So I angled the tape measure until I reached 69 inches and then made marks at 23 and 46 inches. Way easier. Alright so I got my top piece cut and I got my floor vertical legs cut. So the layout is pretty simple here, we just got 2 on the outside and then 2 in the middle kind of divided up evenly between 3 bays here. One thing to notice, a lot of times on plywood that you get, you're going to have a good side and then you're going to have a not so good side. And in this case, since the outside of my bench is going to be up against the wall, I'm going to put the bad side of this plywood up against the wall because you're never going to see that. That way I've got kind of a nicer side on the inside. I do realize that on these 2 middle vertical legs, there's no avoiding the bad side, you're either going to get it on one side or the other, so hopefully the paint or the finish that we decide to use on this will hide some of those imperfections, but I guess I'm not too worried about it. It's going to be underneath the bench and yeah, it's a bench. So the next step is going to be attaching these verticals to the top of the bench. Typically if this was shop furniture or something like that, I would just drill up through this top piece into these vertical legs and attach it with some screws, maybe come back and fill those holes in with some wooden dowels. But in this case, I'm going to try to avoid drilling through this top piece, so I want to keep that kind of nice. So for right now, I'm just going to attach these verticals with some glue and some pocket holes and then after that, I'm going to cut a piece for each one of these bays and stick them in here like that. So I'm kind of building up a dado. Normally you would cut a groove in a piece of wood and create a dado like that, but in this case, I'm just building the dado up. So after these pieces are in, this is going to basically be in a slot. So enough talking, let's get back to it. All right, so like I said, I'm just going to use pocket holes and some glue. So this is, I think, the cheapest Kreg pocket hole jig you can get. I'm just going to clamp that right on the center of my marks and then just drill the holes. For each panel, I used glue and three pocket holes to secure them in place. Using a few clamps to hold the panels in place while you're driving the screws is extremely helpful as well. Then just wipe away any excess glue. Then I measured for the panels that would go in between the legs of the bench. I used my crosscut sled to cut these to size before gluing them in place and then setting something heavy on them overnight. The next two panels were much the same, except I used screws to hold the pieces together while the glue dried instead of my heavy planer. And with that, the basic form of the bench was complete. Moving on to the overhead cubbies. The basic shape and assembly of this is very similar to the bench, except it has a bottom piece to complete the outer shell. I began by ripping some 3 1⁄4 inch plywood to width before crosscutting it to a length for the top, bottom, and the four vertical pieces. I added pocket holes to the vertical pieces and marked out where the vertical pieces would line up so that they match the bench. Then I used glue and pocket hole screws to assemble it, similar to the bench. So to fill some of these holes, I'm going to use some of this wood filler in here, just made by DAP, and then just a little plastic scraper. Just as easy as taking some out and putting it in the hole, and then just kind of go over it and make it smooth. So for some of the bigger holes, you might have to go over it twice, so just let that first a little bit dry, and then when that's dry, come back over and do another top coat on it. Now this is on the end, and this is going to be covered up by the wall anyways, so you're never going to see this, but it's just a little bit better camera angle and a little bit easier to show you guys how this works. But this is going to pertain to the holes on the rest of the box that you actually will be able to see. Once I had all the holes and imperfections filled and then sanded smooth, I could paint both the bench and the cubbies. I used two coats of Zinsser Primer before painting with two coats of a light gray, and when all was said and done, I didn't like the gray, so I painted it with two more coats of white paint over the top of everything. It was a lot of painting. Finally, I cut a backer piece for the cubbies. Then I attached this to the back of the cubbies with glue, screws, and a bunch of brad nails. This backer piece allows me to screw through it and attach the cubbies to the wall in the house. Then it was time for some light demo in what was the laundry room, and for this I just removed the clothes rod and the upper cabinet. I built both the bench and the cubbies to be tight from wall to wall, so installing the bench required me to cut out the trim where the bench would sit. For this, I simply measured and then used my multi-tool to cut the trim, and once it was cut, I could pull it off the wall. And here I'm measuring to cut a notch out for the inactive gas hookup, and I'm not sure why I used the multi-tool instead of a jigsaw, but it got the job done regardless. I mentioned that I built the bench and the cubbies tight from wall to wall, well, so tight in fact that it was a struggle to install these, and I had to remove the door trim to get them in. In hindsight, I probably should have built these in place rather than out in the garage, but it is what it is. Then I picked up a bunch of 1x6s at the big box store in town and began staining them. I used a chip brush to apply the stain, since I had so many boards to stain and this would make quick work of it. Once the stain was dry, I applied three coats of clear satin polycrylic with a foam brush, sanding lightly in between each coat. Alright, for the boards across here, I just cut them to length, and then I'm just going to use a couple brad nails to pin them in place. And don't worry about this, this is actually level, that's just how out of square these walls are. We'll fix that with some trim though. And then for this last piece, I'm going to have to rip it down just a little bit, but I'm hoping that when you're sanding down here, you're not really going to notice that that's not a full width piece. Before I do that though, I'm going to finish up these next two cubes. Then I could rip some bottom pieces to width at the table saw and brad nail them into place. Since I did not disconnect the outlets, I needed to make them accessible with an access panel of sorts, but I still wanted the wooden wall to look uniform the entire way down. I started by fastening some 3 quarter inch plywood strips to the wall to provide some clearance over the outlets. Then I cut some boards to length and started at the top of the wall working my way down. The top boards could be permanently secured to the wall by using some brad nails. This was pretty easy and started to really transform the space quickly. My first idea for the removable access panel didn't completely work, so while I came up with a new plan, I moved on to adding the trim. For the trim I picked up some 1x2 maples from the big box store and painted it all white. Then it was as easy as cutting each piece to length and installing it using some brad nails. So this was my first attempt at the removable panel using magnets, but like I said earlier it didn't quite work. Alright so the whole magnet thing did not work. I was pretty close, but no matter what I tried, it just wasn't going to work. So time to move on. So I picked up some two part clips meant to use on access panels. I used my router to route out a pocket for the clips to sit flush in when they were installed in both the board and on the wall. Alright so I picked up a bag of these clips right here and this is kind of what they look like. So you got two pieces to one of the clips. So this side goes on this side and I'm going to mount this side to the board and then this side to the wall. And actually they go like this. So then when you stick them together they'll be flat. But I don't want to do it because I already did it and I can't get that one apart. So I kind of just wasted one of those, but let me show you how to do this. Alright so you just saw me route out this circle right here and then I used a Forstner bit to drill out that hole right there. Now I'm going to take a couple of these. These are I think just like marking bits for doubling. Typically that's what they're used for. But what I'm going to do is I'm just going to drop one in that side and then I'm going to drop another one in this side and then I'm going to lift that piece up into there and make a mark over on that piece of plywood and that little strip of plywood right there. That's going to tell me where I need to drill another hole so that I can put the other receiving end of those clips up on the wall. So let me show you. Alright so I'm just going to lift this up into place. I'm going to slide it tight up to this next board here and then I'm just going to hit it a little bit. Now that should make a mark on these plywood strips right here and yep I see one right there and one right there. So that tells me that's the center of where I need to drill another hole and mount the opposite side of this clip system too. And then I'm going to put this clip in with this protruding edge in the hole. That way this is almost flush. I've kind of offset this other side on the board so that it kind of takes up the thickness of this flange right here. So that's why I'll put that in there and then I'll just attach it with a few screws. Then I can take this pin out on this side and I can replace it with the opposite side of that clip. Alright let's try it out. Sweet. Yeah that works really nicely. I like that. Pretty simple. Pretty clean. Everything is still flush and you can easily remove it if you need to and then just stick it right back in place. I like that a lot. And with this clip system working I just had to install it on a few more boards to wrap up this section between the bench and the overhead cubbies. Now to move underneath the bench. I used some strips of plywood to mount them in front of the disconnected gas line and vent line. Since these are disconnected I didn't need the horizontal boards to be removable so I just mounted them to the plywood strips using some brad nails. And it turned out that three boards fit perfectly in this space. And to keep the depth of each space under the bench consistent I repeated what I did on the first one. One of the final steps for this project was to add some coat hooks. I simply measured where I wanted them to go and installed them using the included screws. Finally I touched up any imperfections on the bench and overhead cubbies with some white paint and then repainted the mudroom so it looked brand new. I had a blast doing this project and it was pretty simple to be honest. Yes there were a lot of little steps along the way but they weren't that difficult and I truly believe that if you wanted to do this just about anybody could do this same project. Not to mention this space is a lot more useful now than having a washer and a dryer at your back door. Now we have a place to sit down, take off our shoes, store our shoes, hang up our coats, anything like that. It really transformed this space and made it a lot more useful for us. And if you guys enjoyed this video it would be awesome if you could hit that like button down below. That just tells YouTube that this was a decent video and that maybe it should pass it on to some other people to watch. Or if you want to share this video yourself that would be great as well. 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