Mudroom Renovation
It's been awhile since we've posted because things have been so busy! Traveling, renovating, and working sure makes it hard to find the time to put together a post, but here we are, with some updates to the house!
It's the one year anniversary since we renovated our mudroom so we wanted to provide some photos of our progress and all we did to take the room from a mess to the mudroom of our dreams.
Now, before we get too far into this, take a look at the before photos so you can really understand where we started.
We had original cabinets, a mudroom sink that barely drained, laminate floors that were super dirty, and a huge closet stuffed to the brim with random bags, coats, old vacuums, and step stools.
Our original idea was to paint the cabinets and the room to see if that would help make it feel a bit nicer. We have watched enough HGTV to know that this would at least brighten things up and there was a chance we may like it more. Using chalk paint, we put a quick coat on our cabinets and then painted the walls using some paint we had used in our bedroom. For $0, things definitely improved.
After doing some painting, we figured this was good enough. However, as the year went on, we realized the actual issues with the room hadn't been solved. Our sink still didn't work, the faucet was on it's last leg, and the floors only became worse. I also began to wonder if we could do something a bit more functional with the closet. In true fashion with every renovation in our house, we started round two of the mudroom. Now, having done enough renovations at this point, we actually purchased everything ahead of time and staged it in the basement. We purchased flooring, a farmhouse sink, a sink cabinet and parts of the pax system from Ikea, and some butcher block from Home Depot.
First order of business was taking down the cabinets and removing the sink. As with all things with our house, it turns out the sink plumbing wasn't as solid as it should be so we made a note to fix that when we put the new one in place.
We also found some electrical in the cabinet so we ended up wrapping up that electrical and closing in that outlet.
We then go started on the biggest demolition portion of the mudroom...the closet.
This part was a bit tricky but we knew we could take down the closet wall without any issues. Removing the framing was a bit tough, but with a lot of hard work and some persistence, we were able to get it done. We even added a verse from our wedding into the framing of the walls to remind us that we have built our house and our marriage on rock! Together, we can do anything!
Once the closet was torn out, we had to repair the drywall before we could start on the floors. This I have learned is one of my secret construction skills. Getting that done took about a day or two, and then we were ready to do the floors (our favorite!). But really, we had already done about 2000 square feet of flooring in our house to this point, so what is another few hundred? As usual, small spaces are the hardest and trying to move laundry machines around while doing so made it a bit more challenging. We also chose to lay this flooring right on top of the existing. Usually we rip this up, but the linoleum that was in place served as an extra moisture barrier.
Already, the mudroom was looking much better just with some new floors! At this point, we debated if we wanted to keep the color in the mudroom or if we wanted to try something different. After some conversations we figured that it was just a can of paint so let's try to paint it. We went with Hale Navy which is the same color we used in our bedroom!
It instantly made our mudroom feel cozier and we realized would work well with the white shaker cabinets we had purchased!
With the floors and the paint complete, it was time to start putting this room back together.
First we started with the sink cabinet and the sink which it turns it, it is really hard to find a sink cabinet that will support a farm sink especially in the size we had ordered. We ended up having to retrofit an Ikea cabinet to fit in the space with the sink and this took a lot longer that either of us would have expected. In fact, we ended up giving up halfway through because we could not figure it out, and decided to work on the closet space instead. For this, we used two Pax Ikea cabinets and then built a custom bench and overhead storage for the space. We threw up some board and batten too to give it a more polished look and already we knew we had made the right decision to remove the closet! The space was so much more functional.
After the success with the closet, we decided to give the sink cabinet another try. We finally figured out how to retrofit it, but then we realized we also needed to reroute the HVAC in the mudroom as the new cabinet would prevent air flow. I found a special product called a Toe Ducter which actually makes this process really simple. All you do is attached it to the air vent on one side of the wall, and then you can route the Toe Duct to come out of the bottom of the sink cabinet. Of course, this meant additional cutting of the sink cabinet, but we were determined to get this right.
With the sink in place we had just one more crucial element, installing the counter. We wanted to do one that went across the top of the laundry which meant we needed to build some supports. You can see some of that in the picture above. We used 2x4s to brace against the wall and actually built out a side of the cabinet as well for the countertop to rest on. For the counters, we went with butcher block because it was easily accessible and Home Depot had a wide variety of them in stock. Since it is in the mudroom, we wanted something durable and easy to install. We did have to cut the counter a bit to account for the water line, but the results were gorgeous!
The final element was adding some additional board and batten and hanging a drying rack which we bought from Williams Sonoma. They don't sell it anymore, but here is one that is similar. Overall, the results were amazing!