Custom built-in ideas for mudrooms, fireplaces and living rooms.

This guide is about choosing the piece. The right choice disappears into the way you live, except when you are looking for the thing you finally have a place for.

1. A fireplace wall that holds the whole room

The builder version of a fireplace is a bump-out and a mantel shelf from a catalog. The better version is a surround, a mantel at a height set by the opening, and cabinets or shelves on one or both sides so the television, the books, and the things you do not want on the hearth have a home. We follow the masonry or the insert that is already there. We do not remove a sound firebox to chase a trend.

Decide the television and the mantel before the wood is ordered. The screen wants a height the sofa can watch, and the mantel follows the opening, so one of those heights has to give. Closed cabinets below take the cords. Open shelves above take the books. The shelves stop where the heat and the insert maker’s clearances say they stop.

In Naperville family rooms this wall is often wide enough for cabinets with doors. In a Lemont parlor it may need to stay shallow so the chairs still face each other. Depth is the whole design.

2. Mudroom lockers on the way in from the garage

The bench and the garage door

The mudroom in a Fox Valley two-story is frequently a hallway with a hook. Lockers change that hall: a bench you can sit on to deal with boots, and one opening per person. The bench has to clear the door swing from the garage. A seat is often about eighteen inches high and often fifteen to eighteen inches deep. If the swing clips the seat, shorten the bench or slide the run down the wall, and leave a walk that still fits a person in a coat.

Cubbies, doors, and a drop zone

Open cubbies show the basket and get used, because both hands are full on the way in. Lockers with doors hide the mud. A single locker is often twelve to fifteen inches wide. A winter coat wants the wider end, or an open cubby if a door will not close over it. The shelf above is the drop zone for bags, keys, and mail, so they stay off the kitchen counter.

Hooks, shoes, and wet boots

The hooks have to land on studs, or on a cleat we install because the studs are never where the children are. The boot tray stays on the floor. The shoe shelf above it is worth building only at a height a child will actually use, often about a foot off the floor. Wet boots decide the material. Paint-grade wood with a durable finish takes the water and can be painted again. Hardwood shows every ring a wet sole leaves. A panel behind the hooks keeps the drywall from taking the color of the coats.

Four to eight feet, or the whole room

Oswego and Montgomery, IL houses from the late 1990s and 2000s are full of these almost-mudrooms: a drywall box the builder left and called a mudroom. REIJ has fitted lockers in those houses. The piece is often four to eight feet. A full room is the right call when the bench, the lockers, and the door swing cannot share the hall.

3. The triangle under the stairs

If the stair is open underneath, you already own a cabinet-shaped void. Shelves that follow the slope, a small door, or an arched glass front for bottles and glasses turn it into storage you do not trip over. The mistake is a rectangular bookcase shoved under a slope, with a wedge of wasted space above it and a door that binds. We measure the stringer and build to it.

This is interior display and storage. It is not a place we assemble a kit. The glass, if you want glass, is fitted so the arch is actually an arch.

4. A window seat that is a drawer, not a lid you dread

A hinged lid on a window seat looks charming and gets used twice, because lifting it means moving the cushion and everything on the cushion. Drawers below the seat, or a cabinet door at the end, get used every week. The seat height still has to match the window stool so you are not staring at the sash. In a Lisle living room with one good window, this single piece can replace a cluttered corner without eating the floor the way a bookcase would.

5. A dining-room wall of shelves and a built-in sideboard

Formal dining rooms in Naperville and in older Montgomery houses often have a long wall and nowhere to put a platter. A sideboard built into that wall, with shelves or glass doors above it, stores the things you use four times a year and looks intentional the other three hundred and sixty days. Because it is fixed and scribed to the baseboard and the ceiling, it does not walk when someone leans on it, and it does not leave a gap you have to hide with a plant.

Keep the depth modest if people still have to pull chairs out. A sideboard that forces the table off center has failed.

When the doors have to hold the groceries and line up with the kitchen cabinets, the wall is a pantry. That work is kitchen remodeling. The kitchen remodeling ideas for Fox Valley houses pick up the room on the other side of that doorway.

6. A bedroom wall of cabinets where the closet gave up

Ranch and bungalow bedrooms were given a single rod and a shelf. A wardrobe wall — drawers below, hanging in the middle, a cabinet above — uses the whole width of the room’s flattest wall and lets you stop fighting the original closet. It has to stop short of the door swing and short of the window. In Lemont cottages and Lisle ranches this is often more valuable than a living-room bookcase, because the morning problem is clothes, not books.

Painted to match the trim, the wall goes quiet. Stained, it becomes the headboard’s neighbor and should be designed with the bed wall, not against it. Either way it stays. If you move, it stays. That is the point of millwork, and it is the work described on the built-ins page.

Planning a built-in

Pick the wall before you pick the wood. Use the room you live in most, on a wall that is already blank and still a walkway after the piece is in. In a narrow Lemont living room a shallow piece can be about ten inches, with the seating left where it is. Where the room can spare more depth, doors become possible. If the sofa has to leave the rug, the piece is too deep. We will say so when we measure from the shop in Montgomery.

Full height suits a wall that runs to the ceiling and a top shelf someone will reach. A smaller piece is the better project when a door, a window, a vent, or a switch breaks the wall. A shelf that covers a return, or a frame that blocks a switch, is a drawing error. Mark every outlet, vent, and switch before the visit.

Match the finish to the trim already in the room. Paint when the casings are painted. Stain when this wall should be the one with grain, in a wood that can sit beside what is already there. Bring a photo of the wall and a list of what the piece has to hold. The photo, the list, and those outlets are enough for the free measure.

Materials and the install sequence are on the page for custom built-ins in Montgomery, IL. If the blank wall is downstairs, a run of storage or a media wall is part of basement finishing, and the basement finishing ideas settle the room before the cabinets. A custom vanity is built carpentry too. That piece belongs with bathroom remodeling.

Questions before the measure