Jared MacDonald Woodworking

A friend wanted a built-in mudroom bench with storage for shoes, jackets, and so on.

Here is the result:

To make the project manageable, I built it in two independent parts — the storage bench, and the upper panel with shelf  and hooks.

The bench begins as a simple plywood box with a center divider:

I then added a frame to the front and sides using poplar:

I then routed a profile on all the rails and stiles:

Once the base of the bench was built, I moved on to the bench top. This was simply two 1″ thick pieces of cherry stock edge joined together:

The front edge is rounded over, and the top is finished with gel stain and satin poly:

With the addition of two adjustable shelves, the bench storage part of the project was complete:

Now onto the upper portion. Similar to the sides of the bench, this was a large sheet of plywood with solid poplar rails and stiles attached via pocket screws to simulate a frame and panel design – credit to this episode of This Old House for this approach. Here it is without the shelf standing behind the bench:

Again, I routed the interiors of the frames with an ogee bit, matching the bench.

I brought both pieces over separately for installation. To build the piece flush to the wall, the first and certainly scariest step was to trim away the existing baseboard molding – after which we were surprised to find no drywall behind it:

I slid the bench into place, leveled it with shims, and secured it to the studs:

We then placed the top on the bench and secured it to the studs:

The bottom was trimmed to the floor with quarter round molding to match the baseboards, and then the whole piece was painted white to match the house’s interior trim color:

The result: