As far as renovation projects go, this newest one’s a pretty big deal. It’s definitely the biggest project that we’ve taken on in this house so far, and it’s probably one of the biggest that we could do, with the exception of the new garage that we hope to build one day. But who knows when that will happen, right? 🙂 The master bathroom renovation that we did a couple of years ago was definitely pretty intense, but when you rip and entire room off of your house and completely rebuild it, that kind of takes the cake.
We’ve been wanting and needing to do this project for a long time and I’m so (so so SO) thrilled that we have the time to dedicate to it now. It’s really one of those projects that will pretty much change the way we use our house and it will really go a long way towards improving our overall quality of life. That’s a pretty big statement, but honestly, it’s true.
We completed a little mini mud room update over the summer in the back hall off of our bedroom leading out to the deck. The project has really allowed us to be so much more organized in a lot of ways and it’s just really a nice fresh space to pass through on the way out to the back yard. This newest mud room though is different because it’s in the front of our house, right off the kitchen. It’s not our home’s main entryway, but it’s the entryway that everyone actually uses. Anyone who comes to our home, from the UPS guy, to friends and family, to random passers-by, uses this entrance into the house. If someone is just dropping their kid off for a birthday party or to visit with one of our kids, this is often the only part of our house that they actually see a lot of the time.
And it was a MESS.
Not an untidy mess, but a structural mess. In fact, the whole room was leaning and falling right off the house. The room had really nice light, and I tried to make it welcoming by always having a few little seasonal touches in there, but it’s hard to hide the fact that your house is literally falling apart sometimes. So now we get to fix that! This project also allows us to start working on fixing up the exterior of our old house, which is obviously needed, so that’s a bonus.
We’re actually keeping the original footprint of the room because it was a good size, but we’re going to be making the stairs up to the door much wider and more inviting, as well as creating a bit of a bigger porch area in front of the door. Inside, instead of plain walls with a few hooks here and there, we’ll have built-in benches, cubbies and shelves around the whole room so that we can store basically everything we could ever imagine needing to store in a mud room. If you’ve been following me on Instagram, you may have seen that we’re also going to have one wall of exposed brick from the original house exterior, so that’s going to be really cozy and welcoming, I think. Basically, it’s going to allow us to have somewhere to store things that are kind of all over the house right now, and it’s going to give us a beautiful, welcoming space to greet our guests in, which is going to be the best thing ever.
But first we have to build it!
I thought I’d give you a little look at the progress we’ve made so far, so you can kind of follow along with us as we go through this huge project, from start to finish.
So here’s where we started. This photo is actually from when we bought the house about 6 years ago. The wall of windows across the left side of the front of the house is where the mud room was and will be.
Here’s what it looks like right now!
Basically, it’s just a roof. 🙂
And a pile of rubble.
I have to admit that I’m a little sad because the house did originally have an open porch where the mud room will be and I do really think that having it open like that really suits the house. I would love to be able to leave it open and just re-build it as a porch, but honestly, we need that mudroom! I’m confident that when we’re done with this and the updates we’re hoping to do on the front door entrance (the real one), that the house will look great from the street though.
Right now though, we have dirt. And we have the old stairs that we need to get rid of, and we have a ladder up to our kitchen door. OK, entering into the house by ladder is actually proving to be kind of fun. We’ll start building soon though, so we’ll have to use that back hall mud room area that we did in the summer as our main entrance for a little while.
So that’s where we’re at! The new windows and door have been ordered and should be here soon and we’re hoping to have the walls all closed in before the snow flies, so we’d better get going on this. As always, thanks so much for following along with us on all of our DIY adventures! Hopefully this will be another good one! 🙂
MORE PROJECTS LIKE THIS
- Before and After: Our Grey and White Master Bathroom
- Before and After: Farmhouse Kitchen Update
- Before and After: Baby Jack’s Nursery
- Before and After: Kennedy’s Room
- Our New Back Hall Mud Room Area
- How to Quadruple the Amount of Storage in Your Kids’ Rooms
- The Creek Line House DIY and Renovating Archives
Courtenay Hartford is the author of creeklinehouse.com, a blog based on her adventures renovating a 120-year-old farmhouse in rural Ontario, Canada. On her blog, Courtenay shares interior design tips based on her own farmhouse and her work as founder and stylist of the interior photography firm Art & Spaces. She also writes about her farmhouse garden, plant-based recipes, family travel, and homekeeping best practices. Courtenay is the author of the book The Cleaning Ninja and has been featured in numerous magazines including Country Sampler Farmhouse Style, Better Homes and Gardens, Parents Magazine, Real Simple, and Our Homes.