This past weekend the weather here was pretty iffy; quite chilly and raining off and on…so we decided to tackle a project inside that has been looming over us for years. In fact, it’s been almost two years since we last did any major work in our mudroom…which is a shame because we walk through that room every day and I’m probably in there 10-20 times a day, even when I’m only passing through for a moment. After the last time I cleaned up the room and put away a bunch of junk that was cluttering it, it was like a huge weight had been lifted from my shoulders. I didn’t dread going in there anymore, even if it was just glancing in there as I threw something into the garbage or grabbed something from the freezer trunk.

The mudroom before the last major cleaning

Because the room was still unfinished, we couldn’t start building my dream mudroom shelves or do much else that would improve the room. Long channels were cut into the walls so electrical cables could be run which still laid open. There were also what seemed like hundreds of nail and screw holes in the walls where the previous owner had mounted electrical cables with clips all over the place. In the photo below, you’ll notice the brown straight line running around the door — that’s the channel I’m talking about. And the little flecks and spots around it are mostly nail and screw holes.

This wasn’t our largest or most intense project, especially since we had all the materials already just waiting for us in the mudroom. Plus there really wasn’t that much to do. I’d guess maybe 15 linear meters (45 feet) with most of the channels being about 2 inches wide. And of course the thousands of small holes that made the room look like it had been the location of a major gun fight. Vacuuming the walls (to get off dust & cobwebs), mixing the plaster and filling the holes only took a couple hours time and we kinda wondered how this little project got put off so long. Especially since we know that the change it’s going to have on the room will be dramatic. It’s already much friendlier without all the dark holes…and some day I’d like to put some cabinets about the freezer trunk because we just never have enough storage here.

Now we just need to wait a couple of days for the plaster to dry and then I will start painting the walls and eventually the grungy doors too. In case you’re not familiar with our mudroom, the door on far left goes into our walk-in pantry. The next door with the jackets on it leads outside although we have no key for it (or at least no idea which key it might be since the previous owners left us literally hundreds of keys around the farm. And on the right is the door into our kitchen. And I was standing in front of the green door that leads out into our courtyard (in the middle of the photo below).

Once everything is painted, Stefan will eventually take on the project of building us some custom shelves for the right corner of the room. They will be used to hang our jackets in, have cubbies for boots, a place to hang Ayla’s leash, space for a few drink cases, a shelf for the vacuum cleaner and mops, a place to put other random stuff that we use regularly but have no other home for, and so on. Then when we take the dog for walks and she gets all dirty, we can bring her in through here, towel her off in a place that is mostly removed from the house and not worry so much about the dirt. We’re also going to put a counter top down the left side where our washer/dryer is so we have more work space.

I’m thinking of something along these lines but not quite so fancy with all the trim and molding.

Source: www.homesbyrexbrown.com

And I absolutely love the way they’ve pulled out the drawers in these shelves so you have a place to sit and lots of drawer space to stash things in…but I would like to have doors on several of them just to keep things cleaner. Since Ayla would be shaking off all over the place, stuff in these cabinets would not necessarily stay clean…and we have a major dust collection issue as it is. So doors just seem smarter for us even if they will be a little harder to build that way.

Source: www.kbbonline.com

In the end, I just want us to have a place for the day to day outing stuff that isn’t right by our front door. We have a decent little shelf system with hooks for jackets and cubbies for shoes…but the shoes rarely make it into their caves and there is all sorts of other junk piled around the bench and in the cubbies above. I’d just like to keep all the chaos out of the entry and put it in a more chaos friendly place. Plus, there’s just not enough space for all our gear by the front door so I hope that a bigger area will make it more likely that things end up in their own places.

A girl can dream, right? What’s your dream mudroom look like? Do you already have it in place or do you just pine over the fabulous ones you see online and in magazines that no real person has or ever will use in their lives? 😉