Front Entrance Nook

Closets are a place we clutter and a space to hide things...we wanted to start off avoiding that by creating a nook area to sit and store our shoes, jackets, keys and bags nicely. After pinning everything nook idea I liked on to my Pinterest we finally said..ah, we're doing our know.

So we did this without having to knock out any walls or ripping up anything besides the trim boarding the floor.    

Here is before:  

Ryan took of the bifold white doors before I got the picture (not complaining at all!)  

Screw in four 2X4s in the corners 

Add another 2x4 across the from and back 

We bought a stron but thin wooden board and cut that down to fit at the bench sit. From JoAnn Fabrics we picked up 3inch foam...you could easily use 2inch. We winged it and should have prob went with the 2inch. We choose a burlap fabric that has a simple black altering chevron pattern across it. After barely getting the fabric to cover the entire seat we put the stale gun to work. Love my staple gun!!! We stretch the fabric probably a bit more than we planned and should have but it turnabout great! We didn't factor in the thickest if the foam when we got the fabric cut :) oops! Oh well, now we know. 

  In the meantime, Ryan added more 2x4s vertically across the opening aloh with smaller 2X2 boards on top for a bit more hieght.  

We feel inlove with the idea of covering a wall with wood the second we saw it. Although our original idea was to used old unwanted palettes we soon realize that not only was that time consuming for multiple reasons (searching for them, contacting the people, getting them, taking them apart and denailing, sanding them and lastly staining them. So we came up with another idea, wood shims. Cheap enough, stain nicely and no taking out nails and staples! 

So on the one nice day we have had in about 6 months...I got out early In te mornig to start staining! The window panel and legs are for our DIY coffee table. 

After staing and spraying them all with a sealing spray we started nailing them in with a nail gun. Luckily Ryan's brother, Shawn has a large amount of tools and is nice enough to let us borrow them:) Thanks Shawn! 

We added the bottom boards first before we screwed in te hinges or bench sit. 

Hinges in and within seconds Ryan was already cleaning up...he is a bit of a clean freak wen it comes to stuff like that :) we added hinges so we could open the bench and store shoes, maybe add a basket for socks or gloves. We will be adding a dividing board in the middle underneath. Back will be storage and front will be a rock bed for shoes. Living where there is a rather large amount of snow or water on the ground most of the ear we wanted something and somewhere to keep all of our wet shoes. 

Until we get to finishing it this is where we are at for now minus the mirror and hooks we have added since the picture. 

Finished product coming soon (I hope)!!!