One of the blessings of having an enclosed 4 season porch is that it gives us a place to store things.....one of the problems of having an enclosed 4 season porch is that it becomes a dumping ground for anything that doesn't have a permanent home. As my friends and family know, I like to keep things organized.....from my Tupperware filled pantry to the boot tray where we drop our muddy shoes and boots. I despise piles! I feel that any and all items in a home should have a place to store them. You know, a place for everything and everything in it's place.
Well, for over a year now, we've been using our enclosed porch for everything from a sewing porch(until we finished off my new studio) to a holding area for coats, hats and mittens dumped on an overused clothes tree. As we continue to find "homes" for all the loving items we brought up from our much larger home in Florida, I feel more and more satisfied that we are not living in total chaos. Building a mud room cabinet wall was a natural in our progression toward that end.
So this is what we built this week:
Nothing fancy, this space just to the right of the kitchen entry door is all about function. With a little country cute thrown in to make me smile. We bought 2 pantry cabinets from Lowe's and installed them first with the amount of space we had available between the kitchen door and the 2 meat packed freezers.
My only request was that this fun vintage wire shelf fit in between the cabinets. Now our coats have a designated place from which to hang, and there's plenty of space for hats, and whatever else we use on a daily basis, depending on the weather outside. I love this shelf and have been waiting ever since we moved here to find a permanent home for it. I think this space suits it just fine, don't you?
We took the extra shelves out of the bottom of both pantry cupboards and reused them in the upper section, which gave me a safe place to finally store my platters where they won't get banged around and chipped. My electric griddle even fits up there. Yippee! Another big kitchen item finally has a home.
As these cabinets were meant to have shelves in them and not hanging coats, we had to come up with a solution to attach a bar for the coats that would be secure enough to hold a bit of weight. Ta-da! Joel came up with the idea to use 12" wide melamine shelving and it worked great! And I'm so happy we can hang our winter coats out of sight until we need them again next year. I also had extra door knobs from our kitchen project and we used them on this project so as to make it blend in with the new kitchen.
All winter long we three would drag our muddy boots into the kitchen so we could sit down on a chair to put them on before going outside. You know what that meant. Yup. Caked on mud always ended up all over the floor as we walked around. Joel put together this really sturdy bench seat in between the cabinets so now we have a place where we can pull out our boots from underneath the bench, sit down and put them on before going outside. Problem solved.
Unfortunately, my flash washed out one of the details I just love about this project.....we put vertical slats of beaded boards on the wall behind the bench and wire basket. I'm sorry it didn't show up in this shot, but trust me, it looks really farm house-y. You know, my kind of decorating look for our house. The basket on the right is from Joel's Aunt Ruth and I use it to bring in flowers and veggies from our gardens. It's just so much more satisfying to me to use pieces with a history while going about my daily chores.
As for the bench, well, I used the stain from our step into the kitchen and then sanded it in between each of 3 coats of polyurethane to make sure it will stand up to years of use and abuse. Joel made sure it is good and sturdy with 3 supports underneath the 2"x8" bench boards. And now there is a load of space beneath the bench to store our boots and shoes. One thing about living on the farm, we track a
lot of mud, dirt and grass into the house. A lot! I'm hoping that by pulling our mucky shoes off and placing them under the bench we can eliminate tracking so much dirt into the rest of the house.
When we were at Lowe's yesterday, I purchased 2 of these solid boxes and organized our hats, gloves, mittens and scarves in them. Now they won't be a jumbled up mess when we go to use them next winter. I still have plenty of room to install another shelf above the mittens and I'm sure I'll fill that space later today as I unpack yet another of the few remaining boxes in storage on the other porch.
I know what you're thinking, who knew it would take me over a year to finally finish unpacking? I've always been the woman who was unpacked within two weeks of a move....pictures on the walls and everything! But in my defense, it's kinda hard to unpack when we have such small closets and no garage. Now we're finding more and more ways to be creative in our storage solutions and this mud room fix is awesome.
While I had the stain and polyurethane out, I decided to finish up the butcher block we installed last Fall in the butler's pantry. It sure looks a lot prettier stained dark and all smooth from multiple sandings in between coats of the poly.
Oh, yeah, this is much better now. And, it's also easier to wipe the counter clean since it's a smoother surface. This little space packs a lot of function into one narrow room. The washer and dryer are behind me in the photo and the repurposed old kitchen cabinets provide tons of storage for Ball jars and canning supplies, large kitchen electric appliances like blenders and extra staples such as flour and sugar sacks that are large and heavy.
While I was in the mood to clean up our messy enclosed porch, I asked my guys to bring the old wash stand down there. We removed the shiny brass handles and replaced them with drawer pulls that match the kitchen. Ahhhhh, I see a theme developing here. Dark handles against creamy white painted cabinets. Yes! It's all coming together now.
And since Spring is officially here to stay it was time to bring out a sweet little nest with 3 little eggs inside it. I love to stack plates inside the huge glass cloche and layer the whole thing on top of a cake stand. That's how I decorate for Spring!
So, there you have it. Our "little" project of the week. Oh, yeah, in between all the construction, we spent 6 hours mowing for the first time this year. It's been raining so much we had to take advantage of the one day when the sun was out and the grass was dried out enough to mow. Soon it will be time to plant the gardens. And our muddy boots now have a new home......
.....in the mud room,
Debbie
