Mud Room and Music Room Done!

February 14, 2013

Happy Valentine's Day!  Life is good and I have two more rooms that I can say are finished. First, let's take a look at the Mud Room.  I have no real "before" pictures because it didn't exist before the remodel.  However, you can take a look at where we used to hang our coats and throw our boots in this picture.  The mud room occupies the outside door, the window to the left of the door (removed in the mud room) and the half of the window to the right of the door (removed in the mud room).  It also extends out to the closet in the left of the picture.  The closet was removed affording us the opportunity to put a window in, giving the room much more light.

The strange thing is that although we built a mud room effectively inside the living room, we now actually have more space inside the living room.  As you can see in the outside if the mudroom "after" picture here, we can have two chairs and a table instead of one chair and a table.

 I have to say that the mud room is one of my very favorites which is good because it is the room I see most when I come in the door.  This is my view.  The bright spring time green helps to get me through these dreary winter months as well.  And of course you have heard me say it before, I LOVE my aspen door...

The cabinets are recycled from our old kitchen.  I stripped and stained them and David put the polyurethane on them.  NEVER again, but I do like the finished product...

The benches took a long time to finish as we had to do five coats of poly and each took a day to dry.  However, I think they will definitely be able to take the pretty good beating that my kids will dish out.

This is looking back at the door I just walked through.  It is so nice to have a much better insulated door as things stay much warmer now.

And now for the music room.  There really isn't a whole lot of change here except for the fact that we moved an entire wall in three feet so that the room is much smaller.  Hey, the kitchen needed it and it was totally worth it for us.

Here is the room before.  notice that the windows will change as we put in much more energy efficient windows, a necessity in this climate...

Now, you can sort of see the wall that juts into the room as you enter on the right...

This is before, looking at the stairs, the room is much bigger...

This is after, with the top of the stairs now behind the wall...

This is the side of the wall that pushes into the music room...

You can see how it connects now...

This is looking at the old music room from the front door...

And now it looks like this...

So we lost a little space, but it is still just as functional as it used to be, and the space it afforded us allowed us to put an island in the kitchen which is priceless.

Last, but certainly not least, we put new hardwood treads in the stairs.  The old ones were made of very soft wood and were falling apart.  These should last forever, and with the kids growing up and having all of their friends over, we wanted something tough.

That's it for this post.  I will be back next time with before and after in the basement.  I personally think that those will be the most dramatic pictures.

Wishing you all a very Happy Valentine's Day.

~Mary