Mudroom Before and After

April 2012

After taking some time off from our bedroom and hallway paint-a-thon we finally got enough good weather to finish off the mudroom.  This room seriously feels like it haunts me... how can we still be working on it?  Over the winter, I had sanded the closet door and painted it and also stripped the hardware and reinstalled it back in place. I also added two coats of poly to the floor so that it was easier to mop up.  The porch paint tended to scuff and discolor so we thought this would help make it more resilient.  Josh also install some base shoe around the room to clean up the edges. The only thing we had left to do was to paint the doors and add the finishing touches.

Josh and I took a Saturday and teamed up to add two coats of our favorite red paint on the doors. We decided instead of painting the doors white in an all white room, to paint the doors the same color that we did on the exterior.  We felt this was in keeping with our theme of this being a porch, not a staircase landing.  We wanted it to feel more a part of the outside then the interior. I think this reforced our decision to paint the floor with porch and install exterior bead-board.

Before:

 

After:

After we finished painting, I added the old hallway runner to the space and started to think about accessories.  The room gets a lot of use and a lot of bangs and bumps. We were a little nervous to put up a lot of artwork in the space.  In the end, I pulled out two photographs I bought in London ages ago and decided it was their time to shine.  I took them to Michael's to be framed, using our signature black frame and white mat to beef them up and hung one on the wall from the kitchen and another on the wall to the basement.  I was happy to see them find a home after 8 years of hiding in a box. I also think the pops of red, black and white work well with the room as whole.  My last addition was a cute brass dog head coat hook I got a couple of years ago at anthropologie.  It made the perfect spot to hang Gus's rainjacket (yes my dog has a rainjacket, you laugh, but the smell of wet dog 9 months out of the year is not a joke).

Before:

After:

Down the line, I would like to update the rug and add some additional art.  Hopefully in a year or so this area won't be as much of a construction zone and we can put some nicer things in it.

Dare I say... I another room down?

The round up:

Where we paid:

New custom made French door $1,900.00, New energy star dog door- $175.00, Installation of new french door and dog door $300.00, Cost for paneling, installation, and skim coated ceiling: $650.00, One gallon Acrinamel Semi-Gloss basic white paint- $43.00, One gallon porch paint- $45.00, Artwork- $120 for custom framing and matting, Coat hook-$12.00 Anthropologie, New light fixture-$120 School House Electric, Electrical for light- $60.00

Where we saved:

Tore up the linoleum ourselves, decided to keep original floor instead of installing tile, sanded the floor ourselves, painted the room ourselves, reused an existing rug, reused existing paint for the doors, reused existing poly for the floors, reused existing hardware by stripping it.

It still a huge expense which feels crazy for a mudroom, but then I have to remember: we had an unusable door, structurally unsound framing, no light, falling down plaster, horrible floors all of which greeted you from our kitchen.

The Mudroom Vortex

July 2011

One of things that can often be the most frustrating part of remodeling is how once you complete one project there is another one right there.  When your whole room looks horrible you can overlook at lot of issues, once you fix one thing in the room the other things look even worse!  Insert the mudroom.  To start, this is not a mud room.  This is the staircase landing to the basement that also opens to our backyard.  I wish it was about 3x bigger because it seems like everything ends up here! 

Once we installed the new french doors and new dog door the rest of the room looked even worse!  The plaster was cracked and crumbling,  the trim was half painted, and we pulled up the 70's laminate tiles in the space exposing beat up wood floor and steps. This space is right off our kitchen and when I sit on my spot on the couch I can actually see into it from the living room!  It needed to be addressed. 

 

 

Our first step was to fix the crumbling plaster.  It was pretty beat-up and was covered in chipping lead paint.  Josh and I decided it would probably safer and easier in the long run if we went ahead and covered the room in bead board.  We were already friends with bead board, we had installed it as a back splash about 6 months earlier (see post) and we knew it would work.   I drove out to Mr. Plywood (yes, that is a place... and it is awesome) and bought 4 sheets of pine exterior grade bead board as well as some trim pieces.  I took the day off work and hired our friend Gordon (dishwasher installer extraordinaire) to install the pieces. 

This was another job we thought about doing ourselves however there was a LOT of angles in the room and the sheets would need to be cut perfectly. Perfect isn't quite Josh and I's style... decent is more our speed.  Gordon spent the day installing the sheets and by the end was calling the room the Oregon vortex.  There was not one level surface in the entire space.  The floor slopes down, the stairs go up and down, the room also seems to slant toward the left.  The moral of the story is... it is a lot harder then it looks, especially when the vertical lines of the bead board will happily tell you how unsquare things are.

 

In the end, I couldn't have been happier.  I desperately wanted to get into the space and start painting but we still have to sand the floors, skim coat the ceiling and sand everything.  But the good news was that the lead paint was gone and so were the crumbling walls!