Mud Room ,Finito

One more "to-do" has been marked off our list.  The mud room, aka Dermot Healy Hall, now has insulated and painted walls, a place to hang our chore clothes, room for muddy boots and a bench to park our keisters or to place stuff while we unlock our door. No more struggling to open a door while your arms are full and you're being pelted with rain, hail or snow. It's a grand new room indeed, quickly becoming my favorite room of the Looney Bin. Below is the before and after.

We built the mud room using the concrete pad already in place. Prior to this we had for the last year and a half, walked directly into our home with our cruddy boots, stinky chore clothes, hanging them just inside the door-in our living room essentially. When guest dropped by, this tiny entry area become even more crowded with shoes and coats.

After the framing was completed a few weeks ago, (with help of friend Jay) and the outside was covered with old (circa 1865) metal barn siding, we spent the next couple weeks working on the inside. The walls were insulated with batt insulation and then plywood was used for walls and ceiling. Keith also wired the little room for a single overhead light. Below you can see the outside of the grain bin to the right. We did splurge on a new window too.

One of our challenges was the area where the wavy round bin wall met the straight plywood wall. The gap between them was filled with spray foam but it of course it expands and looks like frosting being squeezed out of a Suzy Q. Then it gets hard.

 

Even after  removing the excess foam with a box cutter, it still looked ugly so we solved the problem with a narrow piece of trim we had kept from some project, sometime.

Jay had built a bench frame for me along the north wall and Keith pulled out a 15 inch wide piece of wood from our old barn in Chatsworth, built in approximately 1895.  It fit the bench very well and after several coats of thick lacquer it know lives on under our bums.

The multiple hatch marks on this piece of wood, we are speculating, might have been the area where chicken butchering was done. Or, it was a mean brother's way of keeping track of all the times he teased his sister . Go ahead, make up your story. I love good fiction.

I painted the walls a very light green, having picked the color with much deliberation, planning and research It was the only non horribly dark color on the Menard's paint clearance shelf. One gallon for $5. SOLD!

 The outside still needed work as the old metal barn siding (from this property's old barn, not our last property's old barn, in case you're suffering from a little barn confusion) had a fair amount of rust on a few pieces.

So we picked up a can of aluminum paint, which sadly I had to pay the full $20 for, and when Jay visited us again this past weekend, he and I made things all bright and silvery while Keith kept working on our felled Elm piles of wood.

 Neither Jay or I had ever used aluminum paint and that stuff was truly weird. On the top it looked like water does when spilled over gasoline, all swirly with different colors. On the bottom of the paint can was this thick goo we had to mix in. The aluminum paint went on like water but covered the rust really well. We used less than a fifth of that gallon so I plan to use the same stuff to paint the new (old) barn we are building this summer.

We had budgeted $1000 for this project and came in at $680, primarily because we used old barn siding to cover the outside instead of buying new. Our biggest single expense was the metal and glass door for about $200. I like the urban feel it gives this very rural home. You can take the girl out of Chicago but, you know the rest.