When I bought my house back in February 2010, the inspector said the foundation and roof on the back mud room were bad. We could see that the walls were not straight and that the floor had a huge hump in the middle. Upon opening the attic access, we could see ice crystals all along the roof.

The consensus was that it was something that should be addressed within a couple of years, but wasn't an immediate issue. Since the back room had a separate foundation and little tie in to the rest of the house, I decided to ignore it while fixing up the more regularly used areas of the house, including the kitchen and bathrooms. Over the two plus years of owning it, I've become more familiar with the drawbacks of the place, and so felt ready to tackle the back room in a more meaningful way this autumn.

Rather than putting a bunch of money in to making a nice mud room, I wanted to rectify a few shortcomings of my home. The first is that the living areas have no tie to the back of the house. By putting a living room at the back of the house, along with a deck, I hope to open the house to the back yard. Second was to put in some sort of fireplace or potbelly stove. After investigating a ton of options, I decided on a traditional wood burning fireplace.

One of the biggest challenges in designing the room was finding a place for laundry and closet storage. The solution came in repurposing the library. While I loved the book shelves in this room, I really only used the room to toss things before people came over, or to work on the computer. By moving the book shelves to the front family room, and eventually putting my computer in the back room, I was able to set up the former office as a laundry room and add a bunch of useful storage space in the process.

In the next coupe posts, I hope to catch the blog up on our progress so far!

Here's an idea of the layout: