The Mud Room

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5/29/2005      We have a small room off of the kitchen that rarely, if ever, has been mentioned.  Northern homes, especially older ones, have these rooms as a place where work boots, dirty sneakers, overalls, fishing rods and a number of other things can be stored before entering the home.  The mud room is also a great place to store cats on nice, sunny days when you get sick of them getting underfoot , or when you're cleaning and want to pretend that for just five minutes there isn't any cat hair in the house.
     Last year we had a serious problem with our cats using our furniture a litter boxes.  It was due to the move and, cats being total psychotics, ours went completely nuts.  We stored our cats outside in the mud room for almost six months and they actually liked it.  In fact, they were a little pissed off when we made them come in for the winter.
     Mud rooms are a great thing and we love ours.  
     By the way, many thanks to our good friend, Dean in Florida.  We used the leftover screen from his porch renovation to give our cats a secure place to live.
     Anyway, the room is about to slowly go through a great change, but the first step will be to get a door installed.  I studied it for quite some time today and came to the conclusion that Beavis and Butthead originally framed it out.  There are no straight lines to work with whatsoever.  Also, the doorway is so small that no standard door would ever be able to be fitted into it so I spent all day trying to figure out how I could widen the door without the roof caving in.  I finally got a handle on the situation and decided to cut away a bit of the framing as well as the brick work on both sides.  
     This is not going to be a simple project, but if I can get the aperture right I think the rest of it won't be too difficult.    
5/30/2005     It's Memorial Day.  We took the day off.
6/3/2005     It's been almost a week since I started with this door.  While there has been some progress made, the frame of the door has been a huge obstacle in the project's completion.  I bought a 30X80", the smallest door Lowe's carries without placing an expensive special order but even so, the height is going to just barely make it.  
     The width was another problem.  The original opening was 26" wide so I ended up cutting away 5" of brick, which is a lot more than originally anticipated but necessary to have enough clearance to rebuild a complete inner frame.
     On top of all of that, the mud room was so poorly built that using a level to get the frame straight has it tight at the bottom with a 3" gap at the top  This means that I had to cut a series of graduated spacer blocks and will also have to do extensive framing to make it pretty and cover all the inconsistencies.
     It's a good learning experience but a real pain in the butt.  Once....just once...I wish something in this house had a standard size or even a straight line.
6/7/2005      Almost finished and this time my attack & destroy method paid off in spades. The door is hung and a straighter door there never was.  I'm happy that it's up so that we can keep fresh air flowing through the house but I'm happier yet for our cats.  The only blemish on this whole thing is that the cats won't appreciate it simply because they are cats and will more than likely never go out there again just to be spiteful.
     Anyway, all that needs to be done now is to finish the exterior trim, prime it, paint it and then we can tackle the iron railing just outside the door.  After that, it's on to the sliding glass door in the guest room (which I'm not looking forward to in the least.)
6/8/2005      The exterior trim is presenting many problems with very few solutions.  Making it look good is going to take a small miracle.
6/10/2005      A railing.  A simple railing.
     All I was supposed to do was drill a few freaking holes in the concrete, secure the bases with grommets and we'd have a new hand railing to safely take us up and down the steps, but nooOOOOOoooo!  Not our steps!  Our steps had to have a huge chunk of concrete missing right smack dab where the bottom post had to go.  This meant building a form and mixing up a load of concrete to fill in the bad spot.  Now it won't be ready for three whole days, and that's if the patch holds.
     I'm sorry....I lost my temper.  It's muggy out and I keep getting bitten by bugs.
6/27/2005     It's been three weeks and the form is dry enough to wrap up putting in the railing.  It's gotten pretty warm here so the job won't be as easy as it was when it was first begun.
7/2/2005      Great!  Just frigging great!
     I decided that today would be a fine day to finally put the railing up.  The concrete completely shattered into three huge chunks and fell onto the ground.  This means I now have to undo all the railing bolts, buy a 12" concrete drill bit, sing new holes down into the cement that was already there and attach the base with 12" lag bolts (if such a thing even exists).
     When that's finished I have to rebuild the entire corner again so it looks half decent.  Sometimes I get really fed up with this stuff.  To make matters worse. the entire time I was watching all of this crumble between my fingers, my neighbor, Dar, was standing outside telling me how good it was starting to look.  The wall by the steps obscured his view of the tragedy so I just kept agreeing with him so I wouldn't look like a complete idiot.
6/14/2008       A mud room is a mud room, so it doesn't need much attention.  This explains my lack of writing here.  However, I recently found a good deal at Habitat for Humanity on some windows, so I've decided to enclose the mud room and install them.  This will make the back yard a little nicer, help keep raccoons and spiders out, and, at the same time, help keep fuel costs down .