This is a sponsored post written by me on behalf of FrogTape® for IZEA. All opinions are 100% mine.
I’m so excited to share this project that we’ve been working on with you! I always love when I can share storage-related projects because almost everyone can relate to the need for more storage! We have a big mud room space off of our kitchen, which is the main door that everyone uses for our house, but we realized recently that a mini mudroom in the hall by our back door would make a lot of sense as well, so we went for it!
We actually have a lot of different entrances into our house, but this one is the one leading from the back deck into our master bedroom. This has been a semi-finished space for the last few years, but I found myself lining up out-of-season boots back here, as well as bins of hats, mitten, beach towels, and all that kind of stuff. Since it seemed like such a logical place in our home to have this kind of stuff, I decided just to go with it!
This space along the wall really isn’t very big, and we already have a whole wall of built-in cabinetry along the other side of the hall that we added in a couple of years ago. Once we started actually really thinking about it and designing how this space would function though, we realized we could get a whole lot of usefulness out of this teeny tiny space!
Here’s how the space looked a couple of years ago after we added in the cabinetry along just the one side:
If you click over and read the post about that, you’ll also see the before shots from way back when we first moved in here. Scary stuff!
We love adding built-ins all around the house, especially because we live in an older home without a lot of extra closet space and without a lot of extra floor space in a lot of the rooms as well. Built-ins allow you to create a room that’s really functional without taking up a lot of precious floor space. The tricky thing about built-ins though, is that they often need to be painted. When you think about painting every single side of every single shelf and cubby, that’s a lot of painting. All that painting inevitably gives you a lot of chances to make mistakes or end up with areas that look kind of messy or sloppy. I was so happy to partner with Frog Tape on this project because this painting tape makes it really easy to get crisp, clean lines where you need them most. So we were able to keep the walls and trim all around our project looking beautiful, clean, and professionally-done.
We used the frog tape to keep everything looking really crisp and tidy around all of the trim in this room and also in the all-important spot where the stained wood bench meets with the wall. We definitely wanted all of these areas to look as expertly-done as possible, because those are really the places that would catch your eye if there were any glaring mistakes.
When using my Frog Tape, I usually like to tear off pieces that are no longer than about 12″ to make sure that I’m being really accurate with my application. I make sure to press down really firmly on the tape and make sure it adheres well to the surface that I’m trying to protect.
When using other tapes in the past, I’ve found it helpful to go over the seam on all the taped areas with a paintbrush with just a small amount of paint on it to help prevent paint bleed. I found that with Frog Tape, I could just jump right in with cutting in with a full paint brush of paint and I still ended up with those crisp lines I was after!
I thought it was such a fun idea that FrogTape decided to inspire us to use one of their 2017 FrogTape® Design Trends in our project. The trend we ended up following was called “Timeless Touch” because that’s just pretty much how we roll around here all the time. This trend is all about using classic, neutral colors, mixing in your favorite heirlooms or vintage pieces, but then challenging yourself to keep it from feeling outdated by adding in a few fresh, modern elements as well.
Painting this room was honestly a bit of a marathon so I’m really happy that it turned out so well! Sometimes it can be easy to get kind of sloppy at the end of a long painting session but we ended up with something that’s just as beautiful as it is functional, so I can definitely say that it was all worth it!
We’ll be continuing to work on the rest of the bedroom over the next few months and we’ll have some more fun posts to go along with it, so stay tuned for that!
Do you have a DIY mudroom in your home? What part of the process did you find the hardest?
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Courtenay Hartford is the author of creeklinehouse.com, a blog based on her adventures renovating a 120-year-old farmhouse in rural Ontario, Canada. On her blog, Courtenay shares interior design tips based on her own farmhouse and her work as founder and stylist of the interior photography firm Art & Spaces. She also writes about her farmhouse garden, plant-based recipes, family travel, and homekeeping best practices. Courtenay is the author of the book The Cleaning Ninja and has been featured in numerous magazines including Country Sampler Farmhouse Style, Better Homes and Gardens, Parents Magazine, Real Simple, and Our Homes.