My first carpentry project

I'm still busy with school (summer) and home projects.  The laundry room took me longer than expected because I could only work on it in my free time.  I had to empty the room, remove a cabinet and shelving, remove a popcorn ceiling, then skim coat and sand.  Next came painting, then the building of a mudroom bench in the closet.

So the laundry room is right as you come in the back door from the garage.  This is the main door we use.  So this room would tend to get cluttered with coats, shoes, bags, etc.  I wanted one of those mudroom benches with cubby boxes that I'd been seeing in magazines for years, but I didn't have a thousand dollars to pay someone to build it.  

So as I was studying pictures of benches on-line, I thought,  "how hard could it be to build one?"  Keep in mind that I've never built any carpentry project in my life.  I'd repaired furniture, stairs, and things other people had built, but I'd never built anything myself. So as I was looking at pictures, I began to deconstuct the photos in my mind, to figure out all the parts.  I also looked at plans other people posted on-line.

I fiugred out that basically you had horizontal shelves that had to be supported.  That was the first thing to figure out.  Then you had to make it look good and trim it out with molding.  So I began piece by piece.

I knew I wanted plenty of hooks to hang things, shelves to store things, and I only had a mitre saw to work with.  I measured the width of my closet and figured out what size boards I would need, and had the hardware store cut the big pieces for me.  I cut the side shelves and trim.  I bought the decorative supports ready-made.  

I also ended up painting the closet twice because the pale green paint I originally had in there just looked dingy, so I changed it to a darker yellow.  I then had the fun of decorating.  The room is so narrow that I couldn't get a good shot from directly in front, so these shots will have to do.

All in all, I'm happy with the result.  There are errors on it, but I think it turned out well for my first attempt at building something.