The Mudroom
The image below shows the area we were creating a mudroom. It’s hard to tell from the picture that the front door is flanked with two side lights. At some point, a past owner had built two closest at the entryway, basically eliminating the daylight from coming in.
The yard was completely transformed. I’m only going to cover the side yard changes in this blog. I’ll try to cover other areas in future blogs. The side yard had kinda gone jungle with bamboo and other plants. There was a walkway that was too narrow to push a lawnmower from the front to the back. There was also a fence at the entrance and exit of the side yard. The fence wasn’t in great shape and it cut off the flow of the yard.
The existing deck had lots of issues. When we were demoing it, we discovered a ton of things that were kinda scary. It only had one footing in the ground. The other vertical supports were only touching the ground without concrete footings. The joists were not attached to the girder and several of the decking planks weren't attached to the joists. Structurally speaking, it’s a good thing we were replacing it.
Another issue with the existing deck was that it was sticking out into the driveway and made it difficult to get a car to the garage in the back. We wanted to get the deck off the driveway to make it easier to access the garage and increase the resale value of the home if they ever decided to put the house on the market.