finished mudroom! woohoo!

Wow, the day has finally arrived (well, almost, but its close enough for me to post pictures). The only thing missing from our new mudroom is drawer pulls and some decorating (ie pictures on the wall). But all in all, the mudroom remodel is finally done. We started this at the beginning of the year, and like any project that you are doing yourself while also maintaining a fulltime job, and a life... it took awhile to complete. But that is par for the course, and its done now, and I am really happy with it. I utilize it every day and absolutely LOVE having a mudroom again (I had one growing up). Its also the best place as a 'stop over' station for boxes that need shipped, or bags that need returned to a store. No longer do those things need to sit on my kitchen table or counter, they are hidden from daily sight in this room, yet in a convenient "don't forget to take me when u go out" place that I will see as I exit the house :)

If you haven't read the original posts, or have forgotten all the changes, you can take a look at posts on 2/18, 3/6, 3/8, and 3/23. They show the 'before' shots and how much this all changed. The only 'before picture' I didn't take was of our garage bathroom (probably because it was so nasty I didn't want a permanent record of it ha ha), but I do have an 'after picture' of that below.

Well let's get started, this first picture is showing some cubbies and coat hooks, the door to our house is on the right, and on the left is the door into the walk in closet that now has an amazing amount of room for all our stuff. Love it! I will love it even more once winter comes and we are using all those cold-weather clothes.



Interir view of walk in closet. Drawers for hats and gloves. Shelves that I haven't even used up yet!




Girls jackets on the bottom left side. I even moved all Dan's dress pants and shirts out here from my closet into this closet, and we STILL have extra space! (He rarely wears them, so they don't need to be in our closet all the time. His closet is the smallest closet in the house (the girls' even have bigger closets than him!poor Dan), so that is why I had them in mine for a long time. But they were crowding my closet too, so now I moved them into here. Perfect!)




We even have a tall hanging rod area I haven't even started to use yet! I love growing into a space instead of already being grown out of it (like the old little closet under the stairs in our laundry room where all this stuff used to TRY to fit). I have my recycling bins in here, and now our lunch pails and insulated bags/coolers are all handy and neatly placed on the top shelf.




Mine and Dan's jackets are on this side of the closet. I even reorganized my pantry and moved some big bulky items (crock pots/roaster pan/cake pedestal/punch bowl) out here. Easy to reach them, yet out of our way. Perfect place for them. It was very crowded before in my pantry trying to move stuff to get to these things in the back or stacking them so high, yet fearing they'd topple on my head when I tried to get them out.



This is the girl's cubby area. They each have a side to hang a coat and keep their packpacks and school stuff. It has so greatly helped to clean up my kitchen. I hated having their school stuff spread all over our kitchen counter for 9 months of the year. This is much nicer. They are still getting in the habit of unpacking their bags and then putting them out here, but they are doing pretty good.  We had a garage fridge that I decided to move in here in order to save money. It was white, but I loved that fridge. It was a GE Profile and the best fridge I ever had! Loved everything about it. We bought it new for our first house in Vegas and I really didn't want to get rid of it since it worked perfect. It was just the wrong color. Well, so we decide NOT to buy a new one and keep the white one in here. The DAY we move it in here... it stops working right! The freezer still worked but the fridge was 58degrees! UGH! So, I wind up buying this fridge instead, which is nice. But I am so dumbfounded that the other one isn't working anymore, that I really can't believe, nor do I want to believe it. And since the freezer still seemed to work , I decide to keep it and move it BACK to the garage and just use it for water bottles and the freezer part. Well... shortly after deciding not to let the delivery guys take it and dispose of it for free... you guessed it... now the freezer really doesn't work either :(   The freezer is like a fridge so we are keeping water bottles in there (easy to grab when we are outside or as Dan leaves each morning for the gym), the the fridge part is basically unusable because its too warm. The ridiculous thing, is that I still don't really want to part with it! Can you believe it!?  The fridge is 17 years old, I think I got my money's worth, right? But I still like the darn thing! If it worked, and was stainless on the outside it would still be the perfect fridge!  The interior shelving is just the best, AND it NEVER froze any of my food in the fridge (like the one does that I bought to replace it years ago for my kitchen). I tell ya, I am a big fan of GE Profile appliances! I have two dish washers and love them too. Anyway, back to the mudroom. This is the 'mudroom' fridge now,which is nice, because when I go out here to grab stuff, I'm still technically "in" the house, so my feet or socks aren't getting all filthy from walking on the concrete like I used to do when I'd run out to the 'garage fridge' to get something. Its much more convenient, plus since its in an airconditioned part of the house, it probably doesn't have to work as hard to keep up. Sometimes in the summer the garage fridge seems to stumble because its so hot.

I mentioned that we had a bathroom in our garage that we remodeled too. My husband loves working on cars, so when we built this house we built a bathroom IN the garage so he wouldn't have to traipse through the house covered in grease to use the restroom. Consequently, this bathroom has not seen many cleaning products lol. Its sort of been a 'guy's john' and I've stayed away from it. I'd go as far as to say it was almost as bad as some truck stops. I'd also use the sink in there to wash out my paint brushes so it was definately 'utility' minded. It is located 'within' the area that became our mudroom, so it only made sense to remodel this as well and make it into a nice house bathroom (yet still located very close to the garage so it still serves that purpose). It is now beautiful. Its probably prettier than any other bathroom in my house just because it has all the 'new style' woodwork/colors/faucets/ etc. It even has granite! My kitchen doesn't even have granite (yet! it will someday). So anyway it turned out pretty nice. Here it is...

Well, that's all for the remodel. We ordered the drawer pulls so maybe this coming month we'll get those on, then we will 'officially' be done.  Ta-da!