Turn some Lockers into a "Mudroom" in your Garage!

Well, many of you know the family moved into a brand new (read: empty) house over the past year. I'll be posting some of the many projects that we completed as we decided what we wanted to do with our blank canvas. 

Today we have this nice garage. Nice and bare. Great for piles of stuff. 

I found these lockers at a surplus sale. I love the idea of using old school stuff as decor--I am a teacher after all.

Here is what we started with: 

Check out the pile of stuff. We tend to drop stuff in this area in order to keep mess out of the house. 

I started by finding the height I liked best. Notice that ugly yellow and blue? We'll need to take care of that. I built a simple 2x4 frame for the base. You'll notice in this picture the frame is a bit too long-- this was one of my first projects and I miscalculated the dimensions. One other thing of note is that the slant at the top wouldn't allow for any storage up high. I really wanted some way to store as much as possible in this space so I had to figure out how to manage that. 

Here is a shot of the side of the locker. They were taken apart to best fit my space (originally were in sets of five. This meant that I lost some of the metal sides. I ended up purchasing 1/4 plywood and cutting to size to fill the sides. 

I began experimenting with ways to get storage up top. I decided I was going to wall mount a 2x4 to the wall above the top peak of the lockers and then use the down side as support for a shelf. 

The 1/4 plywood also acted as support. Here you can see the side with the plywood support. I simply screwed self driving screws into the supports of the lockers. 

We also wanted a place to sit while taking boots off or (as was the case today) putting snow gear on. I framed the shelf for the bench out of 2x4 and attached with 3" wood screws into studs. I then attached from inside of the lockers (making sure it was level each direction). You can also see the color we chose finally starting to look ok. It took nine bottles of spray paint to get the finish and color consistent. I need a paint gun. 

The bench with scrap wood pieces. The gaps are OK as I decided it would look good to trim the whole thing out with white MDF. 

A picture from a little farther away and we painted the way behind. I just used primer for all of the white paint. 

The lockers ended up looking great and are a great place for us to drop our stuff on the way in. I stained the bench top to match our floors and found some carpet squares (also at surplus) to give it a little more of a nice feel on those toes!