Mudroom inspiration

Posted on November 6, 2013 by Julia at Home on 129 Acres

How many people dream of a mudroom that looks like this?

Mudroom with built in cabinetry and brick floor

Yeah. Me too.

This was not in the cards for our mudroom update.

Some day, I plan on having this mudroom. However, that will involve demoing the current mudroom, building a front porch, relocating the front door, constructing an attached garage and converting part of the pool room to my dream mudroom–complete with heated floor and built-in cabinetry. This is a project that is somewhat, shall we say, down the road.

My current mudroom project was all about the budget challenge: make the room both functional and pretty for minimal money. That meant DIYing, reusing and lipsticking. You know, a makeover, not plastic surgery.

The first decision that I made was exactly what colour of lipstick. It might be an unconventional choice for make-up, but I knew I wanted to go blue–something like the sky outside. The mudroom is a transitional space between inside and out. It seemed appropriate to reference nature. While paint usually intensifies when it’s put on the walls, I was worried that the colour actually might appear lighter in the mudroom, given the number of windows we have. When I saw Wythe Blue on House of Turquoise, I knew I’d found my paint.

Wythe Blue via House of Turquoise

I may be more than a year late to the Wythe Blue party, given that Benjamin Moore named it colour of the year for 2012, but I finally made it.

Inspired by this entryway update from Casa de Lewis, I considered installing paneling, or board and batten, or even just a very simple plate rail.

Board and batten entryway from Casa de Lewis

But then I remembered that with two doors, a window and a large closet, actual wall space was pretty limited, and I decided that extra mill work wasn’t worth the effort (plus, let’s be real here, it would have upped the budget ever so slightly, and I am super cheap).

I also wanted a place to sit down and put on/take off my shoes. By that I mean, a better place than the park bench plopped in front of the closet doors. A simple rustic bench with enough space to tuck boots underneath would do nicely.

Rustic bench from Amy & Eric McVey on Design Sponge

My final inspiration is for a project you’ve already seen: the umbrella stand inspired by Karen’s Country-Living-inspired basket–wow, that’s very inspirational.

Rustic basket inspired by Country Living via The Art of Doing Stuff

My plan was to put it all together, cross my fingers and hope that when it came time for the big reveal, I had a tearjerker What Not To Wear moment and not an Extreme Makeover gone wrong.

And that will be coming up next.

What’s your favourite shade of blue paint? Have you added paneling on your walls? How do you handle seating in your entryway? Are you a What Not To Wear fan? Who remembers Extreme Makeover when it was plastic surgery?

Mudroom before

Posted on November 4, 2013 by Julia at Home on 129 Acres

How many of you out there dream of a proper mudroom? [Both hands way up]

I have always wanted a mudroom–a place to put jackets, shoes, bags, mail, keys, boots, gloves, hats, toys, leashes and everything else that seems to live in that in-between space of outside and in.

Since moving to the farm, I’ve learned that a mudroom is a necessity. Because, you see, there’s mud.

A transitional space where the mud (and leaves, grass, gravel, dirt and all of the bits that surround us) can stay is essential. Sure some of mother nature still ends up in the house, but sometimes she stops in the mudroom to look around first.

Fortunately, our house came with a mudroom. Unfortunately, it didn’t quite match up to the vision in my head.

Here are the befores, starting with a not-at-all-weird panoramic image composed of three pictures. At this point, I’d added a mat in front of the door and some boot trays in an attempt to corral some of the dirt. The bench was supposed to give people a place to sit down and take off their shoes. The fact that it was placed in front of the closet was only slightly inconvenient.

The good feature was that it was a big room (9 1/2 feet by 9 feet) with lots of natural light.

There was lots of space in the closet (if only we could access it) although the storage wasn’t as functional as it could have been. At the one end, the shelving was held up with the metal posts people normally use to stake trees. Of course, they were rusted.

The not so good features were that it was all the same flesh tone. And that flesh tone was made up of lots of different textures.

There was the painted anaglypta wallpaper on the closet doors, the pinwheel wallpaper on most of the walls, the painted brick where the addition tied into the original house and to top it all off the popcorn ceiling.

This definitely was not the first impression I wanted to give when people came to my house. And it’s not the first thing I wanted to see when I came home at night.

Stick around, and I’ll show you what I did to fix it.

But first, I want to hear from you. What’s your favourite feature of the original mudroom? What would you do to fix it? Do you have a mudroom? What is absolutely essential in your dream mudroom?

Umbrella-ella-ella, the country version

Posted on February 26, 2013 by Julia at Home on 129 Acres

I finally took up the challenge, all in the hopes of resolving a challenging situation that has plagued me for years.

I’m speaking of course of the Pinterest Challenge and umbrella storage–life changing, I know.

The idea behind the Pinterest Challenge is, in the words of Sherry from Young House Love, to “stop pinning and start doing.”

My (p)inspiration was Karen’s Country Living-inspired basket. Karen posted a great tutorial on her blog, The Art of Doing Stuff, back in the summer that I pinned right away with exactly this project in mind.

I used a few different materials (no peach basket) and changed up the assembly a little bit, but the end result is the same–a rustic, stylish and super functional basket. Perfect for wrangling all of our unruly umbrellas.

Here is the cast of characters:

Tools and materials for building a rustic umbrella stand

The materials: sturdy wooden board, wire mesh, veneer, wire and wood strips. The tools: sander, jigsaw, staple gun, snips, tape measure. Absent from this shot is a sharp utility knife, a metal ruler or straight-edge of some kind and a glue gun.

I chose a sturdy piece of wood for the base, as I wanted the stand to have some weight so that it would not tip over once it was full of umbrellas. Instead of a peach basket, I used a roll of veneer. The strips are the spacers that are used in big skids of lumber.

That woman in a business suit and heels you saw last week at Home Depot crawling around, stretching to reach under the stacks of lumber? Yeah, that was me. It’s hard to find strips that are long enough as most of them get snapped as people go through the piles, but they were the perfect rough texture for my basket, and best of all they were free.

First step was to make the base. I used a plate as my pattern and cut the circle with my jigsaw.

A few passes with my sander smoothed out the edges and took off the weathered grey outer layer–I wanted a natural wood finish for my basket.

I rolled the base in the wire to figure out how long to cut the mesh–very scientific measuring method, I know–and nipped it across with my snips.

To form the mesh into a cylinder, Karen showed two options in her post: green wire and twine. I chose a fine silver wire that I already had on hand and wound it through each square. It blends in with the mesh perfectly. To deal with the springiness of the mesh, it’s helpful to “tack” it in a few spots with small lengths of wire.

My wire tube was pretty good looking, but to make it a functional umbrella stand, it needed a base. I slid the wood disc into the mesh, lined it up along one of the rows of wire and stapled it in place.

Now for the finishing touches. To cover up the staples, the raw edge of the base and the end of the mesh, I went to my roll of veneer. The veneer was about 6 inches wide, but I only needed strips that were 1 1/2 inches. This is where a good straight-edge and a sharp knife came in handy. I measured off my strips and then scored the veneer along the edge of my ruler.

The veneer was very thin, so the knife cut through it easily. The only challenge was that the knife wanted to follow the grain of the wood rather than the straight edge, so I had to make sure to keep the knife snug to the side of the ruler as I was cutting.

I had planned to tack the veneer to the basket with a couple of staples or small nails–I figured those would be in keeping with the rustic aesthetic I was going for. It turned out though that the veneer was pretty fragile. It cracked as soon as it was pierced. I returned to Karen’s tutorial and decided a glue gun was the way to go.

However, out of all of the tools that I own, a glue gun was not one of them, so the project was delayed until I could borrow a glue gun from my Mom. Turns out she had an extra from my grandmother that now belongs to me. Who knew Grandma was so crafty?

A bunch of daubs of glue around the base attached the veneer to the bottom of the stand. At the top, I sandwiched the mesh between two more strips of veneer and stuck them together with more glue. My edge turned out fairly tidy, so I didn’t apply twine like Karen did.

A couple quick nips with my jigsaw cut two of the lumber yard strips to the right length, and four more daubs of glue had them attached to my basket.

Using a glue gun to stick wood to wire mesh

Sorry for the poor image quality. The sun had set by the time I got to the glue gun stage.

I had forgotten how easy it is to work with a glue gun. It held all of the wood in place really securely and the glue set up really quickly. In no time, I was able to transfer my finished basket to the mudroom and fill it with umbrellas.

Rustic wood and wire mesh umbrella stand

We do not do cute shiny rubber boots here. They started out cute and colourful, but they are now very muddy.

The basket is perfect. Exactly the right rustic style, and exactly the right size (9 inches in diameter and 25 1/2 inches high, in case anyone is wondering). It easily fits our four umbrellas and could probably handle a couple more. I am quite excited to finally have a place to put them and to no longer have to deal with them flopping out of the closet at me. In fact, every time I walk past the mudroom now, I switch on the light just to look my new umbrella stand sitting tidily in the corner. Yep, I’m a little weird.

Now we just have to finish off the rest of the mudroom. We painted the walls on the weekend, but I still need to tackle the trim (currently painted a flesh-tone, ugh), fit out the closet, refinish the closet doors and build a bench. Right now, the umbrella stand is the best thing in there!

Are there any other Pinterest addicts out there? You can see all of my boards, including the mudroom one, here. Have you been inspired to make anything from Pinterest or participated in the Pinterest Challenge? You can check out all of the projects on Sherry’s, Katie’s, Megan’s and Michelle’s blogs. Anyone else have a crafty grandma–or are you a crafty grandma yourself? Does anyone else find umbrellas hard to store?

Video game heaven

Posted on February 17, 2013 by Julia at Home on 129 Acres

Anybody know what this is a picture of?

I wouldn’t know what this is except that I live with someone who exposes me to such things. This picture is from Final Fight, a video game for the Super Nintendo.

Rather than asking what the picture is of, however, I should be asking you what it signifies. What this picture means is that Matt finally, for the first time in his life, has all of his video game systems set up at once.

The reason for this momentous occasion is our new TV cabinet.

I’ve never been into video games, but Matt has played his whole life and has built quite a collection. However, it’s always been a case of he would get a new system and the old one would be packed away. On those days when he really wanted to relive his childhood and play his old Sega Master System (the first he ever bought), he was out of luck.

When we were renovating the basement, one of the criteria was to have a good TV area for watching movies and playing games–any game he wanted. So, we needed a TV cabinet.

And the cabinet needed to do a few things:

Accommodate all of the equipment: the TV, the satellite receiver, the Blu-Ray player and at least 10 video game systems.
Store DVDs and video games.
Keep all of the controllers, connectors and wires that come with video games handy but out of sight.
Keep everything tidy and organized.

I decided my best option was a custom cabinet, so I sketched up a plan, and my Dad and I went to work.

We went with adjustable shelves on the top section and drawers on the bottom. The overall dimensions of the cabinet are 80 inches wide by 16 inches deep by 33 inches high. The top gives us a spot for our phone (we need a land line in the country where cell service is a bit unreliable), our new 50-inch flat screen (more on that later this week) and a little bit of display.

The shelves are dedicated to all of the systems.

Matt has set up his XBox 360, PlayStation 2, Sega Dreamcast, Gamecube, Sega Genesis, Sega Master System, Nintendo 64, Wii, original Nintendo, Super Nintendo. Holes drilled in the back of the cabinet allow him to poke the wires through to hook up the systems.

The best part of the cabinet is the drawers.

There are four nine-inch-deep drawers along the bottom, and they hold DVDs, games and controllers. As we were building the cabinet, I kept increasing the size of the drawers, and I’m so glad that I did. They hold so much and make it so easy to keep everything tidy. It was a big pain to get four drawers perfectly lined up and sliding smoothly, but I can say now that it was worth it to have everything so well organized.

It’s also worth it to see how much Matt enjoys having all of his games at hand.

How many of you recognized the picture at the top of the post? Are there any other video gamers out there like Matt? In addition to Haggar and Cody from Final Fight, our basement has also hosted Link, Zelda and Mario over the past few weeks. What’s your favourite game? Have you ever built a piece of custom furniture? Any tips for constructing drawers? How do you keep video games or electronics organized at your house?