A Wall Is Reborn

It’s raining again. This does not bode well for me finishing the exterior house paint this year. I haven’t given up all hope, but I am trying to except the fact that it may not happen. It’s not the end of the world because there’s plenty to do around here.

Sometimes a really big project requires that you complete several small projects to get ready for it. That is the case with me and my next big project. A few weeks back I spoke about finishing the rest of the downstairs as the next big project. In order to do that I need to relocate the Living Area to another part of the house, and I need to isolate the kitchen from the rest of the downstairs to try and keep dust and dirt at bay. For the most part the kitchen is isolated except for the door leading from the mud room (unfinished) to the downstairs bathroom (also unfinished).

Both of these areas, the mud room the downstairs bathroom, need gobs and gobs of work. They are basically empty shells at this time. The bathroom doesn’t even have rough-in plumbing yet. Hell, it doesn’t even have a door at this point. The idea is to just get a door up so I can close it off from the kitchen.

The mud room is a small little space roughly 4X6 feet that sits at the confluence off the bathroom, kitchen, and back door. The one wall that has no door has a window on it. It should be a quick and simple room to pound out and finish up. If I sheetrocked the room I could almost to the whole thing with just 2 corner seams because in most places the door casing goes all the way to the corners. It should be simple, but it isn’t. Below is a map of the space.



Both rooms share the porch roof so they only have 9.5-foot ceilings. Originally this was one long room that was about 16-feet long. The outside wall with the double window on it was pushed out a foot or so and a door was added to make 2 rooms. Then the mud room part was opened to the porch. The color coding for the walls goes like this.

Green = Floor to ceiling bead board
Red = 60-inch bead board below plaster
Pink = Exterior siding
Black = New walls I built to re-enclose that area of the porch. Framing only.

The plan is to take all the floor to ceiling bead board out of the bathroom and use it in the mud room. There is just enough to do those walls. Both rooms already have a bead board ceiling. In the bathroom I’ll get rid of the 60-inch bead board and use it to augment the supply I have for the butler’s pantry and laundry room. Eventually the bathroom walls will be subway tile and plaster. Both rooms will share a tile floor that will be something like 1-inch hex or penny rounds. You know, with a nice boarder and the field.

This is sort of where I ran in to problems with the quick and dirty mud room make over. The tile needs to go down before the floor to ceiling bead board goes up. The other problem I discovered was with the wall and doorway that separates the mudroom and bathroom. The door was only 28-inches wide and the wall wasn’t built very well. For some reason they built it with 2X4s turned sideways. It was a very thin wall.

So yesterday and today I tore down and rebuilt the wall. I also removed all the exertior siding from the mud room walls. If I had a tile floor in there right now I could hang a door and start to put up bead board. It’d be nice to get this mud room finished because the entry way from the kitchen to the mud room has no door and I’m kind of sick of looking at the open framing on the walls I built a few years back. So I’m thinking I need to tile the room.

If I bought enough tile for the mud room and bathroom I’m looking at about 100 sq ft. I ran down to the home center in town to look at pricing. They have some black and white, unglazed, 1-inch hex tiles for $6 a sq. ft. A monochromatic floor seems kind of boring, but it might be nice. I’m not sure about unglazed. Seems like it might be tough to keep clean. I’m not sure.

They also had some glazed penny rounds and glazed 1-inch squares that were $9 a sq. ft. Both came in a myriad of colors. One thought, just off the top of my head, was the penny rounds with a pale green boarder and then a white field with rosettes of the green in the field. The mud room, because it has no door from the kitchen, is sort of an extension of the kitchen. The kitchen has green walls with the honied white bead board. If I did the bead board walls of the mud room in the same honied white it could look nice. Or maybe I should do something completely different in the way of color in the mud room. Much thought will be given to this over the next few weeks.

No matter what I do, I’m looking at maybe $1000 worth of tile and supplies for the floor. I wasn’t really planning on that right now, but it needs to be done. It would be nice to just buy all the tile now even though I’m only going to do the mud room at this point. Bathrooms are expensive and it will be nice to have that cost out of the way when I get around to doing it in a year or so.

Some on-line tiles places I'm looking at American Universal Corp.(AUC) and American Restoration Tile (ART). AUC is close, so shipping might be doable if the price is better than I can get locally. ART is not close by, but I'm sure they are out of my budget even if they were a block away. Still, the pictures are pretty to look at for ideas.