$111 mudwall step by step

 My $111 mudwall has detailed pictures of the after here, but I wanted to show the steps to get there.

 I hadn't used a lot of mdf before this project, but I fell in love with it for a couple of reasons.  After sanding, painting, sanding bit more, and then final painting, it gave a really smooth surface.  Another thing I love is that I found pre-primed 1 bys at the local store, and the two edges were already routed with a round over bit saving me two steps.  Third is that it is really inexpensive which you can't beat!

I started by filling holes from the old coat hook panel, and then located the studs.  Using screws made for mdf  (important as it doesn't hold screws the way wood does,) I attached my top row first ensuring it was level.  I then attached the left vertical piece butting it against the horizontal strip being very careful to make sure the vertical piece was plumb.  These two strips are the basis for everything else, so I spent some time making sure they were exact.

I then added the other horizontal strips followed by the right vertical strip.  Each of these was a 1 x 2 cut to length but any width would work.

Next came another 1x2 which I placed on its side to make a ledge.  I used a nail gun along the back.  I was adding additional pieces on top of the ledge back, so the weight of those would further secure or sandwich the ledge.  Otherwise, I also would have used glue.  And I wish I could say why that extra piece of mdf is there, but I usually can't even remember what what day it is so that will remain a mystery. 

I then cut my vertical pieces that will hold the chalkboard, galvanized steel and calendar area in place.  I used a rabbet bit on my router to cut one edge on 2 of the pieces and both edges on 2 more pieces.  The center strip is stacked so there are actually 4 total.

I cut my chalkboard to size after taping the cutline to prevent excessive chipping of the surface.  I used my Dremel multi-tool which worked great.  (Poor thing died not too much later.)

To secure the board, I first screwed a strip with only one rabbeted  edge on the left, slid the board into the edge, and then screwed a double routed edge strip tightly against it.  The board is supported by the ledge, so it is an easy one person job.

I repeated that process with the galvanized steel.  I was going to put a whiteboard on the right hand section, but since I already had a chalkboard and the steel is both magnetic and a dry erase, I saved money by leaving it blank.   I attached the right hand section last.

A 1 x 3 mdf board and a piece of cove molding finishes off the top ledge.  Since I used a stop block to cut the vertical pieces, it fits snug and level on top.

The lovely thing about painting is that any imperfections can be filled away with the three products below.  Quick tip about caulking the edges:  fill a container with ice water, dip your finger in, and then use it to wipe the caulk away.  It won't stick to your finger and any extra dissolved in the ice bath.  Yay!  Also, caulk isn't sandable, so don't use it to fill holes.

Here it it getting painted.

I painted these bins from TJs the same color and installed them last.

I purchased the white hooks for shoes online from Amazon (loooove Prime) and I found the nickel ones at Home Depot.  I was lucky enough to find packages of these all the way at the back of the shelf.  They were from a vendor that they no longer used and the price check came up less than half what the individual hooks would cost.  The little cup hooks have been in my picture hanging supplies forever mainly because I don't hang cups. 

And here is the before and after again:

Mudroom or mud hall or mud wall...

Do you dream of a mudroom?  I do.  I would love a full mudroom with baskets, and benches, and lockers, and shelves, and all the amazing ideas I see online.  The thought of not having shoes and stuff piled all around the house is dreamy.

I sometimes think that all I do online is drool over other people's mudrooms.   But unfortunately,  I don't have a room, hallway or wall any of the great options could fit in. All that I have is a short hallway that has three doors.  Here is the layout:

The opening on the lower wall is the doorway that leads to the family room and kitchen.  The space between the garage door and the laundry door was originally the space I had though of for some type of mini thin cabinet, but that didn't work.  First, the cabinet would have to be very thin, and it would need some kind of sliding door to keep the clutter hidden.  (You can see this wall from the family room and kitchen.)  I even built a carcass for it and decided that it protruded too much in the hall and made walking too tight.  (That became my son's bookcase, but that is another post.)

The only thing left was the opposite wall where we had some hooks already.  It looked awful and didn't store shoes, purses, etc.  Here are some before pictures:

Shoes piled up at the door, coats piled on each other and on bookbags, and random things taped everywhere by my son.  He loves tape.

The words functional or attractive would never be used to describe this hall.  I would see this mess all day long going from my bedroom, the garage or the family room plus every time I did laundry.  And laundry is depressing enough on its own.

I really wanted a solution, so armed with this 3 bin chalkboard thingy I found this at TJs (of course!) for 29.99...

and also with 2 years of reading every single board and batten blog post out there, I thought I could come up with something that would work.  My very own mudroom in a hall on a wall (very Seussy so it has to be good) or a "mudwall."

After several iterations, here is my plan from Sketchup:

I wanted to see if I could make this for around $100 excluding paint, nails and glue that I already had.  Also, I had never used MDF but wanted to try it for this mainly because I found pre-primed, pre-routered white MDF boards in the 2 1/2 inch width I wanted.  I also changed the size of the upper sections because I found a 2' x 4' metal sheet at HD, and I didn't want to cut a custom size.  This made the other sections larger which really worked better for a standard calendar.  (If you look closely, I bought the wrong year calendar - 2014 - ha!)  Being as lazy  efficient as I am, I try to incorporate time savers whenever I can.

And here is the finished project! 

 

I used white hooks for the shoes.  They blend in and make it not so hook crazy.

And Jake is thrilled because he has one more place to hide snakes to scare me...

Just a reminder of the before and after

I love this wall!  I am sooo excited with how it turned out!  My Mudwall (it deserves caps) turned out better than I hoped.  Here are some of the details that make it work for us:

- Total cost for this awesome organization was $111.

- The top shelf is just under 7 feet so my 6' 4" husband won't bang his head.

- There are tiny cup hooks painted white above the bins to hold keys so they aren't scattered on the kitchen counters.

- There are 16 white robe hooks on the bottom evenly spaced to hang shoes on.  They are just high enough to hold our shoes off the ground, and the white hooks blend in with the wall when not in use.  I didn't want it to be hook overload.

- In the summer, the Mudwall can hold beach towels and pool toys right as we come in from the garage.  During the school year, it is perfect for jackets, backpacks and organizing homework/school.

- Jake can finally reach all of the hooks unlike the old rack.

- All of our information is finally in one place.  Yay!

- The hooks don't stick out enough to catch anyone as they walk around the corner.

I will post progress picture very soon.   So we love it - what do you think??

Finished master closet - His

Jim's closet is done!  There are definitely things I would do differently (like build each set of drawers as a box like the towers,) but I am happy with how this project turned out.  The storage is amazing and so much more efficient that the wire things we had.

So this is what it looked like before when you opened the closet door:

And this is what it looks like after:

And just for impact:

 Here is what wall 1 looked like before:

Here is what it looks like after:

It was tough to get wall 1 in a single shot, but I think this shows it well.

The addition of 4 large drawers is such a huge improvement.  The towers hold so many jeans, shorts, and folded shirts, that everything has a place to go.  There are a lot of shoes in the first picture of wall 1, and I will do a post to show how we used dead space to handle the shoes and more.

Someday, I will do my own, but I am really happy with this for now.

Window love

Our builder installed a lot of crown molding and column trim, and they put in pretty door casings, but they only put sills and aprons on the windows.

I have been dying to try to install trim, but it seemed pretty tricky.  And then all of a sudden, there were two posts I found that explained how to do it - serendipity!  This is great because I am convinced that I won't like any window treatments on the five windows around my kitchen table unless they are trimmed out. 

The first post is by a Ronda from Batchelors Way when she guest posted on Sandra's great blog Sawdust Girl which you can see  here - did you follow that?  Also, Family Handyman had a great method for measuring here.

I decided to try it on a big empty box looking window that is an eyesore in our foyer. It isn't even close to square and is wavy on the left hand side.

Not a great picture, but I think you get the idea.  I measured and bought just enough pre-primed molding to do the window with a little bit left over.  Big. Mistake.  Here are some pictures of the window progress and why not buying extra was not the best idea.

Then I used the marking method for measuring all the way around.  If you really squint (or click on the picture), you can see the pencil mark on the wall and on the trim.

I got all the way around and realized that I had made a bigggggg mistake! I had forgotten on my first cut that I couldn't just extend the pencil mark in a straight line from the skinny trim side to the top and cut it there because the trim is cut at an angle.  Does that make sense?  The pencil mark was the innermost corner, so I should have extended the mark at a 45 degree angle out.  This left me with a gap.  A big gap.  A non try to fake it with caulk gap.

This shows what I did wrong:

The right thing to do would be to go buy more and install it correctly, but it was raining and a tropical storm was on its way.  It might be 2 days before I could get to the store.  I couldn't bear the thought of this little project being put off when I have so many others I was working on, so I really broke the rules.  (Trim professionals, this would be a good time to look away.)

I cut a piece of molding and glued it into the space.  I know, I know... I couldn't help myself!

Here is the corner after caulking...  It is sooo hard to see it, and fortunately, it is in the lower bottom corner.  Whew!  I DO NOT recommend doing this.  Unless you have a tropical storm coming your way.

And here is the painted window trim...

And here is another view...

I love love love it!!  I have such a ridiculous case of window love!  Now if I can just decide whether to do a stair rail or board and batten up the steps, I can get the wall painted.  Yay!

You may be able to spot the picture of a great board and batten from Better After.  (The person who did the great b & b didn't have a blog or I would link to it.)

Master closet part 2

So this is the layout of our master closet that I have been working on.  The first wall is finished and the details are here.  This is the view of wall 2 and 3.

And here is the plan for wall 3:

The tower on the left hand side and the corner tower on wall 1 span across wall 2.  There will be two rods here for hanging items.  Each tower will be reinforced to hang the rods so they aren't just going into drywall.  These corner tower shelves will hold off season items or items that aren't worn that often.  The hanging clothes will keep them hidden, but they will be easy to access.


Here is the almost finished piece in the closet.  If I were to do them again, I wouldn't use the wall of the tower for the side of the dresser.  I would build the drawers as a stand alone piece and then use a face frame to cover the fronts of the sides.

A finished closet picture will be coming soon!

Master closet part 1

Our master closet really is two closets so it is a little challenging to work with.  Here is the layout:

Before when you opened the closet door, this is what you would have seen:

Wall 1

Walls 2 and 3

Up top

Clearly the white wire shelving and "drawers" weren't working.  This is also after the closet was straightened up.  It was depressing to walk in there everyday, and I want to say that my closet was better.  I won't.


So here is the plan for walls 1 and 3 in Sketchup (love this and wish they would get an app!)

I tried to maximize the use of the sheets of plywood for the towers (Purebond, of course!) so the towers are all 96 inches high. 

The two corners will have shelving that will stay mostly hidden and we'll use that for off season clothing or items that aren't used very often.  I still need to figure out the shelving, if any between the two main units on walls 1 and 3.

There will be two hanging rods at two different heights between the corner towers of walls 1 and 3.  I have added plywood strips using the kreg jig on both towers at the correct height so the rods can be screwed into those instead of drywall.  Also, since each unit is also screwed into the studs, the weight of the hanging clothes won't be a problem.












And here are some progress pictures of Wall 1:


I built the towers outside of the closet and then built the drawers to fit.

Once the two towers were in their corners, I add a brace between them to make the space square.  I then added stiles using blocks of wood as jigs to make sure the space height were the same.  I also added the drawer slides.  

This was the first time using wooden slides rather than euro slides.  There were a few reasons for this.  First, I wanted to try them out.  Second, the drawers wouldn't get heavy use so I thought they might hold up.  Third, I thought they would be easier.  Hmmmm.... Still not sure about that because drawers are drawers and they can be finicky.  I will probably use the drawer slides for the most part in the future, but these do work well.

I built the drawer boxes and fit them.

And then added the drawer fronts.

Yea!  I am thrilled!  There will be several shelves in the towers, but for some insane reason, I thought it would be easier to drill the shelf pin holes once they were installed.  HA!  None of our drills would even fit in the opening, so we bought a small profile Black and Decker that would.  On the plus side, the smaller drill is a manageable size for my 7 yr old.  Lesson learned!

I keep opening up the door just to stare and smile and not just because I can say 'I built that' but because anything that even hints at organization and neatness makes me swoon a bit.

More to come!

Here in Florida, my unwanted guests are usually bugs, snakes, scorpions...

I thought that the great brownish/grey color and rustic look of this piece would look great in the bedroom redo maybe leaning up against a modern mirror.  Then my husband reminded me that in Buffy the Vampire Slayer, every demon who came out of the ground came through a symbol like this.  Back it goes - stat - because I'm thinking that I really shouldn't have any "portal to hell" decor.  Sigh...

Now, I just need to make sure it doesn't fall over so it is lying flat on the ground and that no one accidentally cuts their finger on it before I can get it outta here.

 *This post was written before I changed the name of my blog.*