Mud Room Project

So child rearing has recently halted any new projects. I am bucking that trend by attempting a renovation of the mud room that leads from our back yard to our kitchen. This is one room in the house we have not touched since moving in. It was covered in a particularly bad wallpaper pattern, which we always intended to change. Over the past five years had slowly filled up to about chest high with random junk. I took the "before" photos after cleaning out the junk, so you will have to leave that up to your imagination.



The plan for the room is to clear out everything, strip the wall paper, paint the walls and trim, and furnish the room with built in storage. This should give us storage for the remaining random junk, as well at alleviate the amount of things we keep in the kitchen and dining room.



Progress on the room has definitely been slow. I have been finding that things go much more slowly with a baby in the house. Removing wall paper istedious and time consuming. I also got a nasty surprise when I started removing the wall paper. It was installed directly on the wallboard, with no spackling or primer between. This meant that pulling down the paper also pulled off the top layer of the wall board. This has added a new step to the project, covering the exposed paper with a skim coat of wallboard joint compound.



After a couple of weekends of work, I finally got all the wall paper stripped. This allowed me to move on to the skim coat the next weekend.



As of tonight, I got the skim coat applied. This took four buckets of joint compound. Tomorrow, I sand. Then I can finally primer and paint the walls and ceiling. After that, the cabinets go in. I will post another update once I am finished with the final product.