When we built our house, we had the option of building a floor plan with a HUGE mudroom (and pantry, but the one we have now works just fine). We really agonized over this, because the floorpan also had a third car garage. At the end of the day, we really liked the layout and natural light in the floorpan that we currently have- so, with those two factors, plus saving some money & yard space (smaller home footprint), we opted for our current home and floorplan. What that meant was that we needed to get a bit creative with “drop zone”/mudroom areas.

We have never had a dedicated mudroom, so foregoing this option wasn’t earth-shattering for us. At our last house, we had the same situation, where our garage door opened right up into the house, without having even an open wall available to build a little drop zone on. We used the same solution in this house, that we did in our old one. This IKEA shoe cabinet. We get so many compliments on it and people are always shocked to find out it actually houses all of our shoes!

We swapped out all of the knobs with these cute ones from World Market. Something to keep in mind with this cabinet, is your baseboards. Ours are a bit higher than standard, so we have to put a few felt pads under the feet of the cabinet to make up for the difference!

This cabinet serves as our shoe storage portion of our “mudroom”. It’s right inside the garage door and allows all four of us to store our shoes without them being seen.

This is the other area we use and built for the girls, which you can read more about HERE. Us adults have a much less adorable version in the form of a coat closet that is between the two spaces shown in this post. This drop zone area is where they keep their backpacks, jackets and extra outerwear like hats, raincoats and gloves. They also keep their larger shoe items here, like rain and snow boots.

Despite not having a mudroom, these two areas, along with the coat closet under our stairs works just fine for us. In fact, I think it might actually be better, because I have a feeling our mudroom would always look like a tornado had just run through! These spaces being in the main part of the house, forces us to keep them more tidy!