Some of you know about my “little” project. My mudroom. I’ve been working on it for months a couple of days each week. I finally finished it a couple of weeks ago and am starting to have time to sort through the photos and bring the project the blogland.. I’m going to to my best to show you everything before the boys start school which will give me a deadline of a couple of weeks. Cross your fingers that giving myself a deadline works and I don’t instead spend all of my time on other house projects….. Here it goes:
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I cannot believe that I’m actually writing this. For months I have been following Sawdust Girl in complete awe of the way she just takes down a wall here, puts one up there, panels this, builds cabinets, etc. I knew that she occasionally took on clients and mentored them through their own projects and hoped that she would have an opening at some point. Well, that point came and I JUMPED on it (so quickly in fact that I was the first one to schedule with her when she opened the door).
I knew just the project. We decided long ago to (at some point) turn our teeny-tiny-itsy-bitsy office into a mudroom. A place for the 4 little coats, numerous shoes and soon-to-be backpacks. So, after months of pinning and dreaming of my ideal mudroom, I now had a legitimate reason to act on it.
The Before-Before when we bought the place:
The exterior door goes right to the breezeway where the boys walk in from playing in the mud and pine needles. Notice the teeny tiny tile patch where you can stand to take your shoes off so that you don’t bring all of that in on my new carpet.
The Before-I-talked-with-Sandra (Chris and his dad removed the doorway and wall):
Can I just interject here? The wallpaper and curtain came with the home and have been behind a closed door for the first year that we owned the home. Ok. Let’s carry-on.
Our initial consultation was supposed to be, I think, just to talk about the project and my skill level, but I was so ready to go that Sandra gave me my homework and I was off! We determined that for the look I wanted, I needed to rebuild a portion of the wall. What? Build a wall? umm…OK. Sandra talked me through it and by the second week I had the wall framed.
I also removed the old window trim and updated it to match what we are putting in throughout the rest of the house.
If anyone wants step-by-step tutorials on this, let me know and I’ll put it together. It is so easy it is ridiculous! On a high from week one, I was ready to jump into week two!
To be continued….
Just kidding! Let’s continue that now, shall we?
With my frame up, the next step was to tackle the flooring which would be extended further than the tile to allow you to actually walk into the mudroom. So, out came the tile and a large section of carpet. In preparation, I had to fix the floor where the original wall had been removed in order to have a nice flat surface.
You’ll see that I also added my drywall. Wow. That stuff is heavy. You’ll also see lots of shoes as we move this project because, you know, I didn’t have a mudroom to house them. I happened to have a little extra babysitting time so, I added the frame for the new entryway. In hindsight, I should have waited until the flooring was in… I also called my electrician and had him move the outlet that was right under the window to much lower to the ground AND had him move my light fixture so that it was centered correctly. It was driving me nuts that it was off when I looked into the room.
Thinking of electrical (’cause if you give a mouse a cookie) I decided to install an automatic light switch so that I wouldn’t have to continually tell the boys to turn off the light in the mudroom and, so that their dirty little hands wouldn’t get dirt all over the wall as they were trying to find the light. Super easy and the boys had a blast walking in and out of the room getting it to turn on for the few week or so. Thank goodness that has passed!
Week 3 coming soon..
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