Home solution: Our entry way

We feel really lucky.  We fell in love with a beautiful piece of furniture that would solve all of our problems related to coat storage.  The new problem - the price and the shipping costs were way more than we wanted to pay.  I did my usually waiting for a sale and finding coupons, but we were still not comfortable with the price.

We were still highly motivated to fix our coat problem.  Our previous "coat closet" was also the closet in one of our guest rooms in the back of the house.  The proximity of the closet to the front door caused us to just drop our coats on the backs of chairs around the house.

What to do?

We took a closer look at our catalog solution and discovered that it was metal square tubing and angle iron.  If we could find a good welder, we could replicate the design.  We did some asking around and found one of parents in my husband's school district.  He took a look at our pictures, took the dimensions we had in mind for the space, and talked to us about price.  He was going to charge about as much as the shipping cost of the catalog piece.  Sold!

My husband bought the wood for the bench and storage shelf.  Our neighbor helped him glue and plane them.  My husband put on the finish and spray painted the metal frame.

And, we have a completed project!

I added a leather storage box with a lid for all of our scarves, hats and gloves.  I am thinking of adding another for umbrellas.

We are super happy with how this turned out and look forward to paring down our coats since now we can see them all at once.