Room By Room: The Mudroom

On to the mudroom!

This is by far the largest laundry room I've ever had in my entire life.  It runs the entire length of the kitchen, and the washer and dryer were stuck waaaaaay over in one corner, and the passage to the garage was waaaaaaaay over in the other corner.  The water heater also used to be in this room, and every time you turned on the hot water in the house it sounded like some sort of Thing From The Swamp was rising up in my mudroom to drag us all to a watery grave.  Seriously the thing scared the bejeezus out of me the first time I heard it.  While ordinarily I'm a fan of pocket doors, the tiny one in here that led into the kitchen was so narrow that Jeremy's chair couldn't fit through it without scraping the walls, and the door track had settled so that the pocket door would stick and scrap against the jam.  An extremely odd coat closet with two doors-- one on the kitchen side and a really narrow one (about eight inches wide!) on the mudroom side added a slightly bizarre touch.  Really the rest of the long narrow space in here was wasted.  The slide show of the construction process is after the jump!

The size of the area made it a perfect place for the new pantry, with its three-foot wide door making it easy for Jer to roll into.  There's still more than enough room for him to get around in the mudroom even with the pantry added to the space.  The gurgling, scary Water Heater of Doom was traded in for a gas model and moved out into the garage, which no doubt will help me be much less jumpy when I'm alone in the house at night.  In its place we now have that fantastic mudroom bench!  There's a feature that's absolutely essential for all the Pacific Northwest winter weather, and I'm not sure how we ever got on without one before this house-- already the area is seeing a lot of use. 

The pocket door and odd coat closet disappeared, and now Jeremy has a three-foot wide doorway into the mudroom from the kitchen.  The new high efficiency washer and dryer are front loading so that Jer can use them easily-- something I'm pretty excited about.  I'm putting him to work!  Our laundry table is perfect for folding clothes and storing odds and ends, and the utility sink provides additional storage and is much, much prettier to look at than its previous incarnation in plastic.  New floors and a new coat of paint finished up the remodel. 

Is it weird to say I'm actually enjoying spending time in the laundry room?  Because I feel so much better about being in there now-- the room feels pretty friendly (especially now that the whole top shelf of the mudroom bench and the back of the folding table are lined with books) and I don't really think I'll mind doing laundry in there, which is saying something as it's the chore I dread the most. 

Tomorrow I'll show you the bathrooms!

~Jess