Mudroom Makeover

Our house has a back room that is truly a multi-purpose room.  This is the room as it was when we bought our house in the summer of 2007.  It is a narrow, long room that exits out to our deck in the backyard.  From what we can tell, there used to be a doorway from Greta’s room into this room, the door would have been in the  middle of the wall on the right side of this photo.  A second chimney is above this closet shown here and there is still brick underneath the flooring of the closet.  It makes me wonder if this room were a originally more of a porch.

This room has a nice view of the yard and the large maple tree growing just beyond the deck.  It gets excellent afternoon sunlight and is truly one of my favorite places to just be.

It is also the laundry room.  We stacked ours and put a wire shelf in the laundry closet to give us more space.  

It is my art & sewing room.  I used the extra counter top from the kitchen remodel and placed it over two plain cabinets as an art table.  It is the perfect height to stand or work and roomy enough for my numerous art supplies.

It is Brownie’s access to the backyard – thank goodness for dog doors!  We quickly replaced this screen door with a newer one that also had a dog door.  The previous owners just propped open the screen door – hence the thrashed threshold in this photo.

The dog door access also this Brownie’s room.  There is a door between this room and the rest of the house that we keep closed during the day to keep Brownie and her muddy paws off the couch.  It is a perfect setup for an anti-kennel dog.

This room makeover took place this past summer,  because I decided to make more room for Greta and her artistic endeavors.  It’s amazing how having kids shifts your entire life.  I always heard people talk about this – but it is never fully realized until  it happens to you.  So, I moved a lot of my things out – too much clutter hurts creativity anyway – and rearranged Brownie’s things.  This is the wall soon to be graced with chalk drawings.  Can you see the red North Carolina dirt?  That was going to be cleaned and repainted as well.

After a deep cleaning, the chalkboard paint went up.  Eric had a quick panic moment due to miscommunication.  He thought that I was going to paint only a small section of the wall with the chalkboard paint.  Oops!  I repainted the trim and the insides of both doors with a gloss white.  Added bonus: the new gloss paint surface makes cleaning up North Carolina dirt a breeze.

We found a perfectly good picnic table at the curb(!) on trash day and brought it home.  Once we cleaned it up, we realized it was perfect for Greta’s art room.

I love that the skeptic was the first to draw on the new chalkboard wall.   These days, Greta enjoys making her dots and lines on the chalkboard wall, though dumping the chalk and putting them back in the bucket is usually more fun.  Still, it’s a fun space now that our friends and their children alike enjoy writing or drawing on when they come to visit.

One end of this room is still my art and sewing room, laundry room, and art supply storage area and the other end belongs to Greta.  I enjoy this room even more now that Greta and the rest of my family are more likely to visit.

We emptied the bookcase behind the picnic art table and it filled it with Greta’s books, art supplies, and a few larger size toys.  She loves that she can walk back to this room and sit on furniture that is at her scale.  I feel lucky to have had a space that was as versatile as this – it is now a much more enjoyable room for all of us.  There is even still room for Brownie to hang out.

These could be a fun alternative to chalkboard paint – less of a commitment, that’s for sure!