DIY – Project Palermo

ORC Week 6: Mudroom Before and After

Welcome back, dear readers, to the season finale of “Marti Makes a Mudroom Less Gross.” Before we get to the before and after photos, there are three more projects I need to cover for you: the flooring, the sliding door railing, and some shade trickery. This post is long, so settle in! You’ll be rewarded with a cat GIF at the end.

Floor + Rug

Back in June 2017, I scrubbed the plywood floor and then stained and sealed it with Ready Seal.

The floor definitely looked better, but I still wanted a rug in here. I bought the indoor/outdoor Hodde rug from IKEA shortly thereafter – it covered half of the room. While working on this One Room Challenge, I decided that I wanted something to cover the full length of the room (it’s roughly 6.5′ x 16′). A custom-made indoor/outdoor rug would have run me $700+, and Flor tiles came in around the same price. Painting or stenciling the floor wasn’t a solution because I wanted a rug to help stop dirt and cat litter from being tracked into the house.

I knew from having the Hodde for over a year that it’s super durable and hides stains well. Long story short: buying a second rug seemed like the best way to proceed. The only catch was that the back half of the room is a few inches more narrow because of the brick bump out. I had to trim the rug to fit.

I found this Instabind DIY Rug Binding on Amazon and decided to give it a shot. I carefully marked off the rug and cut it with my sharpest scissors. (I cut right on the line – in retrospect, I should have cut immediately inside the line because you can see some red on my newly-bound edge, BUT it doesn’t matter since you barely see this side of the rug. That will make sense once you see the after photos.)

Then I singed the cut edge with my heat gun. Because the rug is polypropylene (AKA plastic), the threads melted cleanly.

TBH, this was probably sufficient to keep the rug from fraying, but I decided to add the rug binding for good measure since I had already purchased it.

The rug binding has an adhesive strip that holds the binding to the back side of the rug, which you reinforce with a line of hot glue.

That’ll do!

Sliding Door Railing

This is what the back of the mudroom looked like the last time you saw it on this blog. In my Backyard Patio, Painting, and Landscaping post, I said “in 2017, I’m going to put up a railing” – well, I didn’t get around to that until May 2018. I didn’t blog about it then, so I wanted to share it quickly now since it made a big difference to the interior of the room.

I made a pair of simple wood posts to mount on either side of the door, giving me something to hang the railing on. Using my miter saw, I bevel cut the top and bottom of the wood so it looks more finished.

I bought the black metal railing at my Home Depot store – I can’t find it on their website to link to, but it was $60ish. The planters came from Home Depot, too.

The railing is crucial because we now have a sliding screen door in the mudroom. A while back, I found a few jumbled Pella screen doors at Lowe’s. The boxes were beat up and the store employee said they were “last year’s model.” I asked if he’d sell one for a discount and I got it for 40% off! I’ve never bargained at a big box store before and it felt like an achievement unlocked.

Anyway, all that to say: when it’s nice weather, we open the kitchen door and the sliding door, and we get a wonderful cross-breeze from the back to our front windows. The railing would stop anyone (Jarrod) from tumbling out.

That marble door stop is from CB2.

Much better than where we started:

Window Shade Trickery

Speaking of the sliding door: I wanted shades to make it look nicer, but I didn’t want to block any of the light that comes through our new half-lite kitchen door (see Kitchen Progress: New Door, Trim, and Threshold Tile).

So, I cheated! I installed the moulding a foot above the top of the door.

This trick makes the door look taller, which is a better balance for our oddly tall windows, and it allowed me to hang shades without blocking any natural light.

Before and After

Now you’re all caught up! Let’s do this.

Before:

After:

Before:

After:

Before:

After:

Before:

After:

The vintage brass hook holds my errand running tote and this $11 remote control I connected to our patio string lights.

The outlet for the lights is outside under the mudroom. I like to have them on in the evenings sometimes – just because they’re pretty to see from our kitchen – and this remote lets me turn them on and off easily.

Back to daylight! This is what the broom nook looks like with the curtain pulled back.

Before:

After:

In the foreground you see our dust buster, a trashcan for scooped cat litter, and a can crusher. Chicago has a single-bin recycling program (cardboard, paper, metal, glass, etc. goes into one barrel) and there’s pretty low odds that what you put in there actually gets recycled. But there are people who dig through recycling bins looking for cans: I figure if there are people doing that hard work, and someone is paying for them, those cans are definitely getting recycled. I installed this can crusher last week, and there’s a plastic bag hanging inside the broom closet. My plan is to collect cans and then put out the bag for someone to easily pick up.

Next to the can crusher we have some hilariously terrible/beautiful art: a painting our friends Jean and Tyler gave us as a thank you for officiating their wedding; a drawing Jarrod made of the painting; and the original, unrelated photos that inspired the painting. (Jarrod is most definitely not a cop: that’s our cousin-in-law’s police vest.)

Tyler really captured our essence.

Before:

After:

The Ivar shelving unit holds a lot – including our cooler, a bin of reusable shopping bags, a pail of fresh litter, cleaning supplies, etc. – but there’s still room to spare, which is always nice! The Knagglig wood crates are from IKEA and the woven plastic baskets are from Target. I use the step ladder a lot, so it’s handy to have easily accessible.

I actually used to leave this ladder out for Lola to climb up to the top of the shelving unit, but now he has a cat climber. He’s jazzed about it.

He likes to hang out on top of the shelving unit, in this tunnel I made years ago or in the basket next to it.

Ooof, this post got long! Sorry about that. Here’s the GIF I promised:

The End

Early in this project, I accidentally typed “murdoom” instead of “mudroom” and that’s how I’ve been thinking of this space: it felt murdery and doomed. Now it’s a practical, functional room that feels like a natural extension of our house. Thanks for following along!

Previous ORC posts:

You can check out all the other guest participants on the ORC website.

ORC Week 4: Door Trim, Window Shade, and Plant Shelf

Just 2 weeks left in the One Room Challenge! Participating has definitely been fun and motivating for me – I have to plan out my projects to both get sh*t done and to ensure I have something worth reporting each week. Today, I’m focusing on the south wall of the mudroom.

The original door trim was in need of improvement. For this corner piece, someone used a piece of plinth block…? It was the saddest thing I’ve ever seen.

I removed the moulding around the door. Here’s me pulling out nails – I feel like I need to occasionally show pics of me working to prove it’s not, like, house elves doing everything around here. It’s me, wearing hideous sneakers (which are somehow even worse from the back – this may be the saddest thing you’ve ever seen).

I installed new trim and new black hinges as well. Replacing crummy hinges with nice ones is so easy, and it makes a bigger difference than you’d expect.

I stacked pieces of pine and trim to make a simple craftsman header for the top of the door. I also did many hours of work to improve the water-tightness of the sill below the door, but it’s far too boring to get into.

You probably noticed the new shade in the photos above – it’s a Hampton Bay Caramel Simple Weave Flatstick Bamboo Roman Shade. I bought two of these shades at our last apartment: I never got around to installing them there (oh well) and then I never got around to returning them (oops). But it all worked out because they’re great in here! I totally lucked out on the width being the perfect size. And, Home Depot still carries them, so I was able to order matching ones for the remaining window and sliding door (you’ll see that in future posts).

Here’s Lola, helping me out.

So helpful! Lola’s one true love is string. We’ll give him a piece of twine to play with sometimes, and he’ll carry it around the house, yowling with emotion. He will even put it in his water bowl, which is some weird-ass possessive feline behavior. Jarrod and I call it String Madness.

The shades are purely decorative – we could raiser/lower them, of course, but we never do. Form over function isn’t my usual M.O., but this room needed them. As I mentioned in a previous post, the scale of the mudroom windows doesn’t make any sense. They’re far too tall. These shades visually shorten the window height, the wood adds warmth, and they make the otherwise rough windows look more finished.

Below the window, I DIYed a plant shelf with a $3.50 metal bracket and a $12 pine round. This Everbilt bracket is heavy-duty (it holds up to 150 lbs), which is needed because soil – especially wet soil – is super heavy.

I stained and sealed the pine wood using the same materials I used on our kitchen butcher block shelf.

I cut the back couple of inches off the circle using my table saw, so the shelf sits flush against the wall. There isn’t a stud centered below the window, so I installed it with some serious toggle bolts.

Before:

After! (Or perhaps I should say “Progress!” – I may install a baseboard after I finalize the rug situation.)

The size of the shelf is the perfect radius for a 10″ pot, but not a 10 lb cat. Lola can’t fit up here, which keeps the plant safe from his omnivorousness. I picked up the planter for $12 from the Habitat ReStore on Pulaski. If you’re local, I enthusiastically recommend this place. They usually have a nice selection of cheap planters.

The plant is a philodendron of some sort – the label said it’s a split-leaf, but the leaves don’t look at all like the leaves of the other split-leaf philodendron I have. It won’t be able to stay out here all winter because it gets too cold, but so far it’s been chill-hardy.

Two more posts to go! I’m excited to wrap up this space and share the whole room with you.

Previous ORC posts:

You can check out all the other guest participants on the ORC website.
New posts go up every Thursday.

ORC Week 3: Doorway Broom Closet

Welcome to Week 3 of the One Room Challenge, in which I’m trying to make our shoddy mudroom look and function better on the cheap. My previous two posts (Week 1 and Week 2) documented work done in 2016. This post is about a project I started and finished within the past week: a simple doorway storage area.

As I mentioned in my first ORC post, the door on the right (above) was the original back door to our house. When a previous owner renovated, they installed a new door and drywalled over the old door on the kitchen side. The original doorway is where my brass frames are now, and I replaced the other door as part of my kitchen remodel.

On the mudroom side, they left the old door exposed. We only have one closet on our first floor – a coat closet in our entryway – so I decided to turn this doorwell* area into a broom closet nook.

* I searched Google to see if door well/doorwell is a compound word or not and learned it isn’t really used very often in either form! I thought it was a common architectural term, but I guess not. A lot of the online references I found were about Meghan Markle closing her own car door, because this tweet contains “door well.” Anyway, we can move on from this word nerd digression…

Someone taped over the door glass on the interior side, which… ugh. Why. It just looked gross.

I cut a piece of mat board to fit, painted it, and used spray adhesive to adhere it to the glass. Next, I installed a line of hooks. I like the simplicity of these screw-in metal hooks – they’re formed from a continuous piece of steel wire.

I bought a set of antique ones on eBay for a few bucks. You can also buy them new (e.g. from House of Antique Hardware), but they’re plentiful used: search eBay for terms like vintage bent wire hook.

I screwed them straight into the wood door, EZPZ.

To cover the storage area, I went with a curtain. I had two spare curtain panels on hand: one was the fabric I wanted to use, but the other had the IKEA Kronill pleating tape I prefer for tidy, consistent pleats. To avoid having to buy a new curtain, I decided to remove the pleating tape and sew it to the top of the other curtain panel. This meant I had to use the scariest power tool in my collection: the sewing machine. I am not a sewer. I usually pay to have things professionally altered, but the ORC time crunch and my desire to finish this mudroom as cheaply as possible spurred me to DIY this. So, I dusted off my hand-me-down vintage Singer and got it done.

The curtain is hung on a black metal tension rod I bought on Amazon. I had planned to mount the curtain at the very top of the doorway. When I tried that, however, it looked too grand and it drew attention to itself in a “Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain!” kinda way. (Also, please pay no attention to the rug below the curtain – I’m still figuring that out.)

I decided to lower the curtain to align it with the door header, which meant I had to hem the bottom. That’s right: I sewed again. It was actually pretty easy! I’m not saying I’m a hero, but I won’t stop you from drawing your own conclusions.

That’s it! The closed curtain easily hides all the stuff this doorway contains.

And here’s the broom closet loaded up with our broom, mop, dustpan, vacuum, and Chicago Public Radio tote bag that holds all of our vacuum accessories because our dumb vacuum doesn’t offer very good built-in attachment storage.

In the posts to come: more storage, more plants, shades, and cat amenities.

P.S. If you’re a new reader, welcome! Please check out the Bungalow Tour page for an introduction to our house.

You can check out all the other guest participants on the ORC website.
New posts go up every Thursday.

One Room Challenge Week 1: Mudroom Makeover

I’m participating in the One Room Challenge for the first time! If you’re unfamiliar with the One Room Challenge (ORC): it’s a 6-week thing where bloggers tackle one space in their home and post about their progress. There are ORC “featured designers” who benefit from company sponsorship, and there are ORC “guest participants” – commoners like me who opt-in for fun. I’m tackling our back porch mudroom.

Most ORC rooms are beautiful*, which this room is not. And most ORC rooms are done in real time (as far as I know), which this room also is not. A real-time project is not a requirement for participation, and I want to be upfront about that. So, a very important disclaimer: most of the grunt work in this space has been done piecemeal since we bought the house.

(*For some beautiful ORC projects – which were impressively finished within 6 weeks – check out Stacy’s breakfast nook, Ashley’s master bedroom, and Emily’s guest bedroom.)

For me, the “challenge” will be posting once a week, which is something I’ve never done. I’m joining the ORC to spur me to blog more and to finish the room. You get regularly published posts, I get motivation to wrap up this space – it’s a win-win. But it won’t actually win: there’s an ORC prize, which this project is most definitely not even a remote contender for, which is why I don’t feel bad about not doing a real-time project. I didn’t come here to win; I came here to make friends.

Now, let me welcome you to our terrible mudroom, a space I’ve never shown on this blog. Here’s the view from the dining room when we bought the house – this dining room looks much better now (see Kitchen and Dining Room Before and After).

And here’s what the mudroom looked like:

I know, right? (<– Imagine that said like the Jane the Virgin narrator.)

It used to be an outdoor porch. As I described when I tackled the exterior (see Backyard Patio, Painting, and Landscaping): at some point, the porch was enclosed very, very poorly. So poorly that they didn’t even finish the job. The drywall was never mudded. The proportions of the windows don’t make any sense. There’s no HVAC back here, so it’s cold in the winter and hot in the summer. It’s a cobbled-together garbage mess… but it’s sturdy, and it’s not unsafe.

Fixing it properly would require that we tear it down and rebuild it ($30k-ish at a minimum, probably way more than that), which isn’t in the budget and simply isn’t a priority. It functions fine for what it is, and my goal has been to make it look as decent as possible for as little money as possible.

It was gross:

So gross:

That’s the original back door: a previous owner drywalled over it on the other side. That brick bump-out is where ice was delivered to the kitchen! Our bungalow was built in 1913, and I love the remaining historical details.

SO gross:

When we moved in, it quickly became a junk room. I put up a peg board because I thought about keeping my tools here, but I wound up preferring to have them in the basement, where I do a lot of work.

Using this space made it immediately clear that we wanted to keep it – not just tear it off. It’s nice to have an area separate-but-accessible from our first floor living space. It’s a huge help for keeping our house clean – it’s an airlock, both literally and figuratively. I want it to look decent, but even more so, I want it to be functional, practical, and hardworking. (<– “Decent looking, but even more so, functional, practical, and hardworking” will be my Tinder bio if I’m ever back on the market.)

In the coming weeks, I’ll document all the work I’ve done so far, and I’ll let you know when we’ve caught up to real time. And by Thursday, November 8, it will all be finished!

P.S. If you’re a new reader, welcome! Please check out the Bungalow Tour page for an introduction to our house.

You can check out all the other guest participants on the ORC website.
New posts go up every Thursday for 6 weeks.

Kitchen Makeover Details Roundup 2 of 2

And we’re back, for the final roundup of kitchen details. You can check out my kitchen makeover here and the first roundup here.

Exhaust Fan

The fan installed in the ceiling over the range was a bathroom exhaust fan. The sticker on it literally said “Not for use in cooking area.” In terms of air movement, it did exactly nothing, so I removed it. It was unexpectedly difficult – it took some jaws-of-life style prying and cutting. Here’s an extremely flattering photo of me holding the extricated fan like a trophy bass.

I mounted some wood scraps to the studs inside the hole so that I had something to affix a drywall patch to.

Home Depot sells small drywall “project panels,” which saves you from having to buy a full sheet – I cut one to fit.

Then I patched and painted the ceiling, and now it’s like it was never there.

This means we don’t have an exhaust fan in the kitchen, of course, but I’ve never lived anywhere that had a functional one, so it’s not something I feel a strong need for.

Space Above the Fridge

How do you fill a gap between your fridge and cabinets? Short answer: baskets.

Long answer: Plan to build an open shelf. Mock it up with scrap wood. Decide it accentuates the gap to the right of the fridge. Pass.

Consider a flush-mounted filler piece. See something very similar on a Menard’s demo kitchen. Decide it looks terrible and feel grateful Menard’s made that mistake so you don’t have to. Pass.

Short answer: baskets! These Sedona Honey Low Open Totes from Crate & Barrel fit perfectly and coordinate with the color of the wood elements elsewhere in the room.

Frame Grid

Here’s one mistake I made in decorating the kitchen: the frame grid was originally one size smaller. I bought and hung the 5×7 size because I thought the larger size would overwhelm the wall. The smaller size looked okay – I lived with it for a while but it never felt right.

I finally pulled the trigger and ordered six of the larger size, hung them, stepped back, and said “Duh.” It was obviously the correct way to go. These are the 8×10 Brass Frames from Target (the outer dimension is 14.4″ x 18.4″).

Getting these six frames perfectly aligned took some effort, so I wanted them to stay that way. The bottom row is particularly in danger of getting bumped by someone walking on that side of the island. The frame edge was too narrow to use 3M Command Strips, so I came up with a solution: I cut pieces of scrap wood to the perfect depth and hot glued them to the bottom of the frame backing. The frames hang on nails, with added support/stability from the Command strip.

Kitchen Light Fixture

Here’s another mistake I made in the kitchen – four mistakes, in fact: I bought, installed, and returned four light fixtures over the island before I found The One. But I wouldn’t say they were real errors. Sometimes I can visualize what I want and get it right in one shot, but other projects require me to see the options in place before I can choose my choice. I didn’t document all of the rejects, but here are two examples:

This Minka Lavery Harbour Point Semi-Flushmount Ceiling Light seemed like a contender online.

Installed, however, it looked like a brass spaceship… and even more like a UFO when I turned on the light. Pass.

I really liked the look of this West Elm Stem + Sphere Semi-Flushmount, but I decided not to keep it because it looked too new – with all the other newness in the room, I wanted something that looked more classic.

Also: the brass finish isn’t as nice as the brass on the West Elm fixture in our entryway, and one of the globes had a glass inconsistency that created a dark spot like a moon crater. Pass.

In the end, a classic schoolhouse light from Rejuvenation made the most sense here. It’s the Eastmoreland 8″ Semi-Flush Mount with 16″ Opal Shade. It’s big enough to hold its own, pretty enough to not be boring, and simple enough that I can install something more interesting over the dining table without it looking like a carnival in here.

Outlets and Plate Covers

I replaced the beige outlets in our island with new white ones, and I swapped out the beige plate covers with nice metal ones.

I like these pressed metal plates from House of Antique Hardware. Stacy over at Blake Hill House gave me the idea to use a USB outlet. We always have this multiple adapter plugged in here, so we are prepared for any charging emergency. You show up at our house with your iPod Classic at 4%? We got your back.

Seriously: even if you can’t update the outlets themselves, replacing the plates is such an easy, inexpensive upgrade. I always did this as a renter with plates that had been covered in years of paint (see this old post: It’s Electric).

Phone and Ethernet Jacks

Speaking of plate covers: virtually every room in our house has an ethernet jack. There’s a professional-grade routing hub in our basement – I have no idea why. There was also a phone jack on the wall.

I removed both jacks and covered the holes with blank plates that I painted to match our walls. A small change that feels so much better. I could eventually patch these holes, but since I’m not finished renovating the house yet it seemed smart to keep them open in case it’s helpful to have an access point or something.

Dimmer Switches

I also installed dimmer switches for all of the kitchen and dining room lights. I like these Leviton Decora Rocker Slide Universal Dimmers from Home Depot.

I did all of the aforementioned electrical work myself (light fixtures, outlets, jack removal, dimmers) except for one switch. It was my first time installing a dimmer on a three-way pole – meaning a single fixture controlled by switches on opposite sides of the room. I installed the dimmer, turned the power back on, and the fuse tripped. I figured I had done something wrong with the circuit loop and decided to play it safe and call an electrician.

Emilio got me squared away quickly, and even took the time (unprompted!) to thoughtfully explain what I had done wrong and to draw a diagram for future reference – all without a whiff of condescension. Emilio is my guy. If you need an electrician, I’d be happy to refer him.

Arbor Vitae Trees

Last year, I had three arbor vitae trees planted. Our dining room window is huge, which is great for natural light, but not so great for the view.

The bottom of this window is 7 feet above ground level, so most arbor vitae available from big box stores were too short to provide the privacy and greenery I wanted here. Knowing how slowly they grow, I splurged on more mature trees – I didn’t want to wait years and years for them to reach this window’s height. I never mind sharing numbers, so I’ll tell you that they were $800 total, including installation, which required some major digging.

Here’s Jarrod for scale – he’s 6’2″ (I just asked him – he said he’s shrinking in height but getting wider to make up for it). Seeing greenery instead of our neighbor’s vinyl siding was such a huge improvement for our view.

I made this GIF when they were being planted, thinking it would be a triumphant reveal… but they were planted crooked. The landscapers had to return, dig them up, and redo them.

The trees should fill out and up in the coming years, providing increased privacy. I say should because arbor vitae are pretty finicky – they grow slowly and seem prone to dying. It was the only evergreen option for this narrow side lot, so I’m keeping my fingers crossed.

What’s Left

The kitchen and dining room are now 95% finished, which feels great. It joins the ranks of our half-bathroom and master bedroom (I owe you an update on this one) – rooms that are ~done~. The remaining tasks are:

Move the electrical box to be centered over the table
Install a permanent light fixture – I’m circling around this Conical Drum Pendant from Rejuvenation
Replace the window – this will happen along with all the other windows in 2019 or, more likely, 2020
Replace the window trim to match the rest of the room, after the window is replaced

But, next up: I’m moving on to a different room, which I’ll show you next week!