Project Review

​Just finished a project that had three moving parts at once.  We were turning an entryway into a mudroom along with installing a new front door.  We were renovating the entire yard and, lastly, rebuilding an existing deck. 
 
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. 

​During the design process, I had made a couple of quick studies of how it would look if we completely opened the space again, and investigated an open floor plan.

open floor plan concept

​The owners wanted a built-in for the mudroom.  The original design included cubbies and hangers on both sides of the space with a set acting as a bench.  A shoe rack was on one side. 

​The original design got scaled down a little bit.  We decided that the built-in would be only on one side of the mudroom.  You can see below what the cubbies and shoe rack looked like getting installed and how nice the final installation came out.  The new door was painted Spa Blue from Benjamin Moore and the built-in was painted to match the surrounding walls. 

The next image shows just how much usefulness the owners are getting out of the new mudroom - plenty of space for shoes, storage and coats.  Plus you get a ton of daylight into the house. 

​The Yard
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. 

​We decided to clean the side yard out, dig up all of the bamboo, demo the fence and remove the walkway to create a better flow and add quality play area for the kids. 

​The image below show the AFTER of the side yard.  It’s a huge change, and it really adds a relaxing, peaceful place for hanging out and enjoying the day.  We added some stepping stones with a really cool modern paver to give the space a little twist of awesome. 

​The Deck
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. 

This is an image of the existing deck. You can see how it was seating on the driveway at the right of the image.

​The deck was completed in 5 days excluding inspections and rain days which added up to about 5 additional days.  The positive is that we increased the number of footings from one to three.  The new footings are 48 inches deep (about 6 inches deeper than code requires), and makes the entire new deck solid.  We added solar-powered caps for the posts as well as a handrail for the stairs (you can see the handrail and caps in "Day 5".