My wife decided she no longer liked our hallway coat closet and I needed to turn it into a mud room. It was looking pretty ugly, I'll give her that, but we were storing a lot of stuff in there. I wasn't ready to give up all that storage space for some shoe cubbies, a bench and a couple hooks. So we scoured Pinterest for days and finally came up with a solution that worked for both of us.

Our closet was quite the eye sore.

After a few trips to the local home improvement store I was ready to start my DIY project. I began by making the bench/cubbies. First, of course, I had to clear out the closet floor.

Then I cut out and put down the base and sides of the bench:

After that I began to cut out and make the center cubbies:

After I cut the boards I used my Kreg Jig to secure them together:

I made sure to screw them together at a right angle.When I was done, I had a piece that looked like this:

I dropped that into my base and sides in the closet and added the top for the bench:

Next I removed the shelf from the closet and built my own:

I needed to add some braces to support my upper cubbie/shelf:

In a effort to give my closet some more depth, I decided to remove the drywall on the back of my closet. I wish I had done this first.

Once it was finally all removed it looked like this:

The reason why I wanted a few more inches of depth is because I still wanted to utilize the area as a small closet. That would mean I need to build doors:

Here were the hinges I went with:

After the door frames were built I added some wainscoting and trim. I also added a little shelf on each side:

I added wainscoting the the sides:

At some point along the way I added trim and caulked any gaps and screw/nail holes:

Then I started painting:

When it was done, I added some hooks, baskets and bins and we were in business!

And my favorite part of the whole thing is the hidden storage we still have:

What a huge difference before and after huh?

Like every DIY project, it took a bit longer than I wanted it to but I'm fairly pleased with the end result. I might consider buying doors if I had to do it again next time. The doors ended up giving me the greatest source of headache.