I’ve been focused on client projects of late, which has been exciting, so it’s been a while since I talked about any renovation here at the cozy cottage. But that changes now as we are undertaking our first renovation in three years. Consider this your introduction to the beautility room renovation.

I’m talking about our current powder room and mudroom/laundry room at the back of the house. Two years ago, I wrote about how a mudroom isn’t just a mudroom. You can take a trip down memory lane here where I explain and show just how ugly it is, what we wanted to do with the area and how I had planned to do it two phases: phase 1 was to pretty it up myself and phase 2 was to hire contractors to fix the real problems. Then, a few months later, I showed you what the completed phase 1 looked like, as you can see here. And this is where the mudroom sat for two years.

Oh, but there was also that moment late last year when I got really sick of looking at our tattered back door and DIYed a patterned paint job just so I could hate it less. You can see the DIY here.

That back door, actually, is what is prompting this renovation, something we haven’t done in our house since we moved in. You can read all about our first and, to this point, only renovation here. So, about that back door. Well, it’s falling apart. The deadbolt still works but barely, the door is hard to close when it’s swollen, and it’s just an ugly safety hazard.



We realized in May that we would need to replace it this year, but like with almost all things concerning a really old house (the cozy cottage was built in 1903), almost nothing is as easy as it looks. The back door is more narrow than the average size door, which starts at 36″ wide. No appliances can fit through there and, well, it’s just stupid to have such a narrow door when there is room to have a regular size one. So, we either pay extra money to get a custom door in a size we don’t want – too small – or we pay extra money to have the back wall reframed for a larger size door. The obvious choice is to get the door size we want, which automatically means some kind of construction.

But if we’re going to have to do some kind of construction back there, and the entire back of the house needs to be renovated, why not just do it all at once? So, starting in May, we talked to contractors about redoing the powder room, and mudroom/laundry room in question, as well as the kitchen. We got a design plan for the kitchen, estimates for custom cabinetry and the rest of the project, and all of that was exciting, but then it just didn’t feel right to me to spend all that money at this moment for this huge renovation. Yes, the kitchen is hideous and feels closed in and yes, we want to knock it all down, but it was just so out of our budget, especially because we weren’t planning for it.

But we have to replace the back door. So, we decided to move forward with the mudroom/laundry/powder room renovation. And here we are.

What we currently have is a tiny powder room tucked into a back corner, with the mudroom and laundry machines occupying the majority of the space when you enter the back door. Our plans are to gut everything, and create a new powder/laundry room, often referred to as a utility room. But a utility room sounds so ugly and this room will be beautiful (I hope!), so I’m calling it a beautility room. SEE WHAT I DID THERE?! Hence this introduction to the beautility room renovation.

I have created a story highlight on my Instagram page called “beautility room” so you can see all videos, photos and the most up-to-date stuff there.  But here are a couple of videos and photos so you can understand what we’re dealing with.

Here is a crappy cell phone video showing the view of the inside of the house when you walk in the back door. As you can see, even though you aren’t walking directly into a wall, it feels like you’re walking into a wall because of how small our house is:

Here is another crappy cell phone video showing an area that becomes a traffic jam – the wall separating the dining room from the mudroom, creating an odd flow for anyone coming in the back door or from the bathroom to have to walk into the kitchen, exactly where the fridge is, squeeze around anyone at the fridge, and then walk into the dining room. That wall separating the dining room from the mudroom is ANNOYING, to say the least.

Here are a few other before shots of the space:

Now that you’ve seen the before, this is what we’re planning to do: enlarge the back door size to 36″ and replace the door with something all glass to let in light from outside, open up the passageway between the mudroom, kitchen and dining room so there is no wall blocking the flow of traffic, replace EVERYTHING in the mudroom, laundry and powder rooms, and reframe back there so that the powder and laundry room are one larger beautility room and the mudroom becomes more of  a smaller, drop-off point.



Here is the floor plan, not entirely to scale:

The demolition is supposed to start this week and I really hope there are no negative surprises, such as the need for asbestos or lead abatement, or an issue with plumbing or electricity. We are on a tight budget and still haven’t purchased everything we need for the renovation so fingers crossed it all goes well next week so I don’t come back here a week from now crying or complaining about something.

Next week, I’ll share with you inspiration photos and moodboards for the different options we were looking at, as well as hopefully be able to give you an update on demolition progress.

Have any questions about this beautility room renovation? Leave a comment below. To see other projects we’ve done in the house, click here for the master bedroom closet, here for the One Room Challenge entryway project, and here for the new roof.