one room challenge – Project Palermo

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.

ORC Week 2: Drywall Finishing and So Much Painting

Hello again! It’s Week 2 of the One Room Challenge – hop back to One Room Challenge Week 1: Mudroom Makeover for an introduction to this space.

Let’s cut to the chase on one issue I hesitate to even mention: there was lead paint on the ceiling and upper part of the brick wall. Two different contractors who passed through this space looked up and said “Lead.” I believe this distinctive cracking is a tell-tale sign of old lead paint.

Sure enough, swab tests confirmed lead paint – I used these 3M LeadCheck swabs. Red means lead.

This wasn’t surprising because of how old our bungalow is and, to be honest, it’s not too disconcerting to me. If we had kids or planned to have kids, I would be more worried: lead is a very serious risk to children and pregnant women. Furthermore, the lead paint is on a stable surface that we don’t come in contact with – not, for example, on window trim that is subject to friction and heavy use.

I debated including this information in this post because people tend to be alarmists online. I could have simply said “I painted the room” and left it at that, but I prefer to be upfront about the issues I encounter when renovating. So, I’ll tell you what I did, but I’m definitely not saying it’s what you should do. You gotta follow your own arrow.

In short: I contained the work area, I wore a P100 filtration mask, I removed the paint that was loose, I scrubbed all surfaces thoroughly with TSP, I covered the ceiling and walls in 4 coats of paint (2 layers of primer and 2 layers of paint), and I disposed of all supplies once finished. I’ve also added lead testing to my annual physical checklist, so my doctor and I can monitor my lead levels over time and feel confident that my DIY hobby is not endangering my health. Cool? Cool.

Here’s the room ready for painting:

And here’s the room after the first coats of primer:

This is an awful photo, but I wanted to share a tip: when you’re painting a ceiling, especially white on white, painting in a darkened room actually makes it a lot easier to see what’s already been painted and what’s left to do.

There were some visible gaps in the beadboard ceiling after it had been painted, so I caulked those.

Here’s me caulking while a contractor was painting the exterior – you can see more details about our exterior work in this post: Backyard Patio, Painting, and Landscaping.

As I previously mentioned, a prior owner had drywalled this space but did not finish the job. After the ceiling and brick wall were painted, I hired someone to tape and mud the drywall. This wasn’t a skill I was interested in learning myself, and I didn’t want to buy tools that I likely wouldn’t use again.

I hired a contractor via the Albany Park Workers Center. They help day laborers find work and provide them with written contracts to reduce the risk of wage theft (a sad possibility for workers who are vulnerable due to reasons like immigration status). I wouldn’t go this route for bigger jobs, where I prefer to vet who I hire based on online reviews and/or personal referrals, but it was handy and affordable for a one-off low-stakes job like this.

Once the mudding was dry and sanded, I painted the drywall – again, with 2 coats of primer and 2 coats of paint.

Before:

Progress:

Before:

Progress:

So much better! In the posts to come: shades, storage, cat amenities, and more.

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.