Parenting Cubed

While I was away in PEI.. Frank decided he was "bored" and thought it was a grand idea to renovate our mudroom. Renovate to Frank means "rip apart a room and hope to heck Krista won't notice the missing floor when she comes home"!

Well.. I noticed!!

Actually, he has been meaning to get to this reno for the last 2 years. Our house is old.. real old.. about 130years old.. and we've always lost a lot of heat from this room. The floor had no insulation! It was always so cold in there!

So we've (well he) insulated the floor, adding extra boards etc.. for more support..but the fun news is that:

I GET TO DESIGN A NEW MUDROOM!!

I've decided to make 6 "cubbies" along the back room, floor to ceiling, each one 2 feet wide. Sort of like this except instead of hooks for jackets and coats, we'll have hangers. There is NO way my kids only have 3 coats each no matter what season we're in, and I'll have another shelf for shoes. (There are 4 girls and we do love our shoes!)

So that will take up the full length of the back wall.

Now for the rest of the room. I had a pantry there before, and I used it quite a bit, so I know I still want one, but I also need more kitchen space. So I thought of a "baking centre"!

I can take all my baking supplies, cookie sheets, rolling pins.etc.. and move it into this room.

Something like this:

So I'll have 1.5 walls with cupboards and counter space! We've picked out the hardwood floor for this section and the tile for the area by the door and where the cubbies will be.

There will even be enough space for an island!

We're moving the door and installing 2 new windows that are nice and long! I'll finally be able to see out to the back yard.

We are doing this all ourselves, so this is going to be one looong job.. especially with Frank working out of town everyday! But we'll chip away at it little by little..

Here are some more pics:

Abigail found some newspapers from 1972.. had a good laugh at that! We put the front page of the paper under the floor too. It was all about Hurricane Earl! lol

Hanlin was just dying to help daddy, but we wouldn't let him off this little island. Too many old rusty nails sticking out everywhere! Instead we gave him boards to bang on there.
At least there was some insulation in the some of the walls!!