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!
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