Let’s talk about the pros, cons, and process of converting a breezeway to mudroom space.
How does your house connect to the garage? And do you wish that connection was a mudroom? Most people do!
Early mid-century houses were built without garages, so the way an aftermarket garage connects to a mid-century house is inconsistent, but it’s not uncommon to have a covered space, a porch, a three season room or a breezeway, and it’s not uncommon to want to convert that breezeway space to a more functional mudroom.
So here’s what you might want to consider if you’re trying this. It depends on your house, your needs, and even your climate region. But this is a go to space to look for a little added interior square footage.
Note: this was originally posted 2019. It has been updated and now includes a podcast episode for those who’d rather listen than read!
So … this episode and post expand on this blog post series dating back to January 2019, when I was still thinking about this as an interim thing I was doing between one official, real job and another. Before I realized that I was going to make a life out of talking to people about mid-century homes, teaching people how to create their own Mid-Century Master Plans in Ready to Remodel and creating Mid-Century Master Plans for people directly.
I was working on my own home and talking about it because I knew people had questions, so I documented my own breezeway to mudroom conversion, mostly with progress photos. It’s still one of the most popular posts the history of this blog! Because other people are really looking for this. This is a major question for anyone with a mid-century house separated from its garage by a little covered area. It feels obvious to turn this space into interior space.
In reality, a breezeway to mudroom conversion is a little more complex. And in the years since I began my own breezeway to mudroom conversion, work with hundreds of design clients has provided me with even greater insight into what works and what doesn’t.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Original Post
Two weeks ago, when I posted about installing my DIY windows, I promised I’d talk about what’s going on behind that pretty cedar wall. Here’s the progress update on my journey to transform a useless breezeway into a practical mudroom with some bonus garage storage!
I’ll go over not only WHAT I’ve been doing but also WHY it is important and HOW you can start thinking about the same solutions for your home.
Framing The Issue (pun intended)
One problem many midcentury house have is lack of connection to their garages.
If your ranch was built in the 1950s, you may have a detached garage or, like me, you may have a garage that SEEMS attached to the house, while there is no way to get from the house to the garage without going outside.
By the 1960’s builder had figured out that people really liked to go straight from the car to the kitchen, especially here in the Midwest.
Many homeowners with 1950’s ranches are going to have this dettached garage problem. You may have a garage set off from the house in the back yard. Other homes in my area have a garage that shares a wall with the house but doesn’t have a connecting door. My house was separated from its garage by a 6-foot wide breezeway.
Here’s an example of a house VERY similar to mine but with two bedrooms and a slightly different house/breezeway/garage arrangement. See how well this one flows?
With an 8′ wide area only 16 feet long this breezeway works like a little outdoor room, not a dark wind tunnel. Also it CONNECTS THE HOUSE AND GARAGE with aligned doors. Well played, National Plan Service!
While some breezeway connections are good, like this adorable one above … Mine didn’t work. I knew I needed to fix this problem.
Getting lucky with my house!
When I decided to connect my house and garage, I knew I was already in luck. The house and garage were already linked by a shared concrete foundation and roof.
I didn’t even need to get zoning department approval to make my changes.
Some neighbors with similar layouts have simply enclosed their breezeways into screened porches and then cut a door from the garage into that space.
Thats a great, lightweight and DIY-able solution. For the cost of a new door, a few 2x4s for wall framing and some sturdy screen you can have a three season room that:
- connects the house and garage
- is more fun to hang out in
- can semi-securely hold your outdoor gear (boots, coats etc)
HOWEVER if you live in the midwest you know that keeping your snow boots outside the door makes for some very cold feet in the morning. That’s not the BEST solution. I found a breezeway to mudroom change to be essential to my plans!
Here’s the original layout of the house
While fixing my De-Attached Garage Problem, I could achieve three goals:
- connect the house and garage
- create a mudroom space to corral clutter
- win space for a laundry area on the main level
If your garage or back yard connects straight to your kitchen you know why I did this!
Both my front entry and kitchen doors open straight into practical working rooms with very little extra storage areas. With the best of intentions I am always cluttering up the entry way with coats, boots, hats, bags and dog paraphernalia.
Like many people, I need a mudroom to take the pressure off the existing kitchen.
Here’s the planned future layout:
What a breezeway to mudroom conversion requires:
This post won’t cover the fun stuff you see on Pinterest: how to decorate your laundry area or the perfect mudroom boot storage solutions! Those come later.
Today I’m going to talk about the structural bones of the project.
I had to do three things to make this mudroom into a real part of the house:
Get to Level
I wanted this new mudroom to connect to the kitchen through an open door way. This meant I needed to insulate the heck out of the space AND make sure it was level with the kitchen floor.
The concrete floor of the breezeway was 8” lower than the kitchen (at the door) and then sloped away front and back. I needed to create a new raised floor at the level of the kitchen.
(When I redo the kitchen I’ll use the same flooring material over both spaces.)
Wrap up Warm
I also needed to wrap the space in warm walls and ceiling. I don’t plan to get an HVAC contractor to come out and add any extra duct work to the house to heat this space. It may get a small electric base board heater but mostly its going to share the air with the furnace system that already heats and cools the rest of the house. It is important that this small addition take as little extra energy as possible!
The new mudroom’s three walls will actually be much better insulated against cold and heat than the rest of the house – because energy codes have become much more stringent. This little space will hold its heat (or cool) without being an energy liability to the rest of the house!
Build a Firewall
Did you know that people used to be afraid that parking a car in their garage might set their house on fire!
This fear goes back as far as the early days of cars. My parents used to live in a house built in the 1920’s. It actually had a garage attached to its basement but we didn’t park a car in it because it seemed to be sized for the original Model T.
You could tell that the early twentieth century builder assumed people would be afraid of car-related hazards. The garage itself is a concrete bunker and it connects to the basement through a bank-vault style steel door that took a counterweight to open!
Guess what?
People are still afraid that their cars might combust or that the fumes from the chemicals and fuel we keep in our garages might be a danger to the house. And that’s smart. Cars and chemicals do pose a potential threat.
Fortunately we can mitigate that with a firewall – not one to prevent computer viruses – the old fashioned kind. The old school fire wall is just a wall designed to slow down a fire. Thicker drywall and specially rated doors to connect the two spaces keep houses safe!
Breezeway to Mudroom Progress so far:
- I have removed the siding from the garage and existing house wall.
- I then added new floor joists that spanned from the house structure to the garage wall. This worked a lot like building a deck. I bolted a ledge to the rim joist of the house and then ran new 2×6 joists across to the garage wall 6’ away.
- Then I insulated the heck out of the floor cavity with a combination of rigid and batt insulation. I built a slant-shaped sandwich of layers of rigid insulation along the concrete floor. It varies in depth from 1” to 3” depending on how far the concrete was from the leveled joists above. I taped a continuous bottom layer for a good air seal. Then I filled the cavities with R-19 batts.
- Then my pop put another sandwich of batt insulation and rigid foam sheets into the attic area. (In the future I will actually furr down the ceiling to add in another layer of batt insulation. This needs to be R-49.)
- I glued and screwed down the sub floor and it was time to build in the end walls.
Lets look at it step by step!
I cut and (carefully) removed siding
After I’d closed off both ends of the breezeway, I removed the siding on most of the wall between the breezeway and garage. I pulled out three vertical studs to form the step up access between the old garage area and the new extra garage space annex .
Then I started off my house-side demo.
I had to begin with a bit of electrical work, removing and wiring off the so-called outdoor safe outlet that had been in the breezeway. The thing was pretty jenky so I was very glad to see it go. Also, pulling out its box gave me a chance to peek into the wall and learn that I had batt insulation in my walls. News to me!
After that I got out the circular saw and ran a line up the siding just deep enough to cut the boards at the transition point between future mudroom and future back yard sheltered access. I clipped a nail!
I had a moment of panic when I discovered this fiberboard and wondered if it might be laced with toxic asbestos fibers but a bit of internet research allayed most of my fears so I set in with a crow bar to pull it all off.
Look! Old fashioned batt insulation!
I framed the floor
I attached the ledger for the new framed floor directly to the rim joist of the house and then sistered it to the existing studs of the garage. Roxie kept a sharp eye on the process from inside the kitchen!
Insulated it, and laid the subfloor
Since the floor was so variable I used a combination of rigid insulation sheets against the concrete and batt insulation between the joists. It should be well above code and already feels warm to the foot compared to the frigid concrete one step down!
Then framed and sheathed the new end walls
There’s a little more done now than this shot implies. I have the rigid insulation on the walls and the attic is insulated but by that point it was pretty late in the year. I have doors ready to install and the insulation attached to the walls but … it is pretty cold to keep working outside
Where I am now
I don’t yet have the fabulous mud room that I’ll be enjoying later this spring but I already have an attached garage with a practical enclosed vestibule to come and go through for the winter.
On this super-snowy day, I am already SO GRATEFUL to be able to park in the garage and run Roxie straight into the house on the way to and from the dog park!
Tell me what you think!
What’s your garage situation? Attached or detached. Do you have a breezeway? Are you considering a breezeway to mudroom remodeling project?
Let me know in the comments!
Read the Full Episode Transcript
How does your house connect to the garage? And do you wish that connection was a mudroom? Early mid-century houses were built without garages, so the way an aftermarket garage connects to a mid-century house is inconsistent, but it’s not uncommon to have a covered space, a porch, a three season room or a breezeway, and it’s not uncommon to want to convert that space to a mud room.
Today, let’s talk about the pros, cons and process of converting breezeway to mudroom, and what you might want to consider if you’re trying this. It depends on your house, your needs, and even your climate region. But this is a go to space to look for a little added interior square footage. I’ll pull from client examples and also my own home. Will I show you before and after pictures? I won’t, because the project and my house isn’t actually quite finished. More on that later.
Meanwhile, Hey there. Welcome back to mid mod remodel. This is the show about updating MCM homes, helping you match a mid-century home to your modern life. I’m your host, Della Hansmann, architect and mid-century ranch enthusiast. You’re listening to Episode 2201.
So I’m coming back to this topic of how to properly convert breezeway to mudroom in a mid-century house for a couple of reasons. It’s been on my medium term to do list for a little while, and then it came to the top of my mind again, because I’m working on a client project at the moment, which has a space that was clearly once a breezeway and was converted in the past into a little bit of a mudroom at the front where you can enter from the garage and kick off your shoes, and then there’s also a street door there in that space.
And then you step up a couple of steps and go into a dining room space. And it’s one of the key issues in this family that there is not enough space for them and two small children to properly all inhabit that mudroom area. It’s not working properly, so we need to reconceive how this former breezeway to mudroom conversion is working. I don’t think we’ll go as far as tear it out and start from scratch, but I wish that whoever had done that original remodel for them, it looks like maybe in the 90s at some point, had thought of some of the things that I considered when I did my own breezeway to mudroom conversion.
And the other reason I wanted to talk about this is that I have an old blog post dating back from January 2019, about is a progress post when, before this business had really taken off, when I was still thinking about this as an interim thing I was doing between one official, real job and another, before I realized that I was going to make a life out of talking to people about mid-century homes, teaching in ready to remodel people how to plan their own mid-century master plans and creating mid-century master plans for people directly.
I was working on my own home and talking about it because I knew people had questions, so I documented my own breezeway to mud room conversion, mostly with progress photos, and it’s still one of the most popular, the most hit posts in my history of blog, because other people are really looking for this. This is a major question for anyone that has a mid-century house that’s separated from its garage by a little covered area. It’s an obvious so it feels like a no brainer. We should turn this space into interior space.
In reality, that conversion, that breezeway to modern conversion, is a little more complex. And so I know people are looking for advice, and they’re finding this post, which I bet they go looking for. Okay, where’s the finished result? Where are the before and after photos? Why didn’t Della post those? Well, I didn’t post them because this project is not 100% complete. Do I use it every day? Is it a perfect functional connection between my house and garage? Has it passed inspection? Yes, all of those things, but it’s not photo worthy because it doesn’t have a final finished floor, and it doesn’t have trim, and it still has I started to paint it one Labor Day, Day off a couple years ago.
I couldn’t even tell you when. Anyway, it’s a mess, and it’s not quite complete, but functionally it works, and I love the design that I decided on for it that is absolutely worth sharing about. So I’m going to talk to you about what I would recommend for someone else, what I would recommend to the person that owned this house if that person was not me and could go get the project done, and also some of the things about what you’re going to need to consider when you’re when you’re converting a breezeway to a mud room, insulation, floor level changes, fire safety, code related issues and functional storage and life issues.
So we’ll get into this six year old project of mine, still incomplete to this day, and I’ll try to keep it a little bit from being too much of a true confession, and focus on the logistics and the pros and cons of why you might why you might want to leave a breezeway alone, why you might want to convert it and what you might want to convert it into as you do that. And I will, by the way, also talk to you a little bit about the pros and cons of this very similar starting layout of my client with I think they probably have, I have to check the numbers, but it’s more like an eight foot wide breezeway. I had a six foot wide breezeway. There are some key metrics that determine what is and isn’t plausible. For what you can do with a breezeway conversion space in that breezeway to mudroom pipeline.
And we’ll talk about all of that as the episode goes on, before I get into that a couple of items of business. This is a new season. This is season 22 now, when I started doing the podcast again, going back to 2019 I had separate seasons for the podcast because I didn’t do one every week. I did a batch of episodes, and then I took a break and just did client work, and then I did another batch.
Now that we’re a smaller we’re a team, but not just me. I’m able to do podcast delivery every single week, except this past week, but it’s past months where I’ve taken off, and so I don’t need to do it that way, but I do sort of think of the podcast seasons as seasons of the year. We are rolling into the fall season. This is going to take us through to the end of the year. Terrifyingly, almost. This is going to take us through to November, probably.
So I wanted to say two things about that. One, the new podcast season, I’ve got a bunch of topics already outlined, but if there’s something you’ve been wanting to hear about on the mid mod remodel podcast, please let me know. I A lot of the way that I think of topics is because someone asked me a question, or I realized that there’s a question I get asked all the time. So if there’s something I haven’t talked about that you would like to know about. If there’s a particular issue in your house, shoot me a question, and I will try to get into that in a future episode of season 2022 season 22 we’re in 2025 now. But the other reason I bring up the time of year in the season is that I know it still feels like summer.
We’re in the middle of a disgusting humidity heat wave right now as I’m recording this, although I hope it will have broken by the time we go to air. And it is very clearly still the summertime, still the middle of the year. But in the planning scale, in a home remodel scale, we are closing in on the end of 2025 if you want to start conceptualizing, start crystallizing, the dreaming, the hoping, the wishing, the looking, the Pinterest research you’ve been doing into a real project. Get that project underway and break ground on it. And anytime. Well, if it’s small project, anytime this year, if it’s a big project, really anytime next year, now is the time to get that project started.
So because of that, partly because I remind people of this this time every year and partly because of a natural “kids are going back to school, things are about to start shaking out.” I get an influx of new client leads and then kick off master plans around this time of year. Really, in the end of August, early September, we book out pretty far. And this has been very consistent over the last couple of years, because it’s just a truism of the calendar. People start to realize, if they want to be on a contractor schedule in 2026 now is the time to get onto a master planning calendar for 2025 so if that’s you, if you’re listening to this right now, I recommend that you hop on over to the website.
Go to mid mod midwest.com/services, go to our work with us page and schedule a time for us to chat that first conversation is so easy and low stakes, you do not need to have all your ducks in a row. You don’t need to have planned your remodel, as we’re going to do. You don’t need to know everything about your house or even everything about what you want yet, but it’s a great time to get the ball rolling to let us hash out what your process will be.
There’s also a really handy, I hope, fun and easy to watch video about the Master Plan process that should walk you through what’s involved, the timing, the deliverables, what you’d need to provide, what we will create for you if we work on a master plan for your house. And so it’s just a great place to get the ball rolling. I recommend if you’ve been thinking about it, if you’ve been on the fence, don’t wait until everybody else has already gotten through their hesitations and gotten started on their end of 2025, design process. Get in ahead of them and be the next person on the call sheet. We’ve got some openings in our calendar for early fall right now, and so I would love to talk to you about how we’re going to work on your master plan process and get started on making real change in your house.
If you’re a DIY er like me, you might find that having a master plan process helps motivate you to go forward and finish the projects you’ve started and get the bigger things in mind rolling. And if you are not, if you’re sensible and not like me, and you’re willing to hire other people to get work done on your house, so that you don’t just get busy and leave a project unfinished for six years. Oof, I gotta tell you, rereading this blog post, looking at the old pictures, has been a real moment of truth for me, then absolutely, let’s get the ball rolling. Let’s get you started on your master plan so you can find the right contracting team and really start to make these changes happen on your house. It’s time to start living in a house that really is being the home you want it to be.
Let’s make that happen so it’s time to get your master plan rolling. It’s time to reach out and let me know. If there’s a new episode, a new topic you’d like discussed on the mid modern model podcast going forward and then let’s see we have time for one more thing. Oh, I’ve been collecting some weird measurement facts recently, and so I thought I would just do one a week over the next couple of episodes. Here is the weird measurement fact for this episode, and that is, it may or may not have ever crossed your mind, but we here in America, use the Imperial measurement system.
We use inches and feet to design our houses and buildings. Engineers, certain subspecialties do use the metric system, but contractors and architects, we measure in inches in feet, and I have gotten really good in my career at dividing things by 12 inconveniently so that I can figure out those inch to feet conversions. But it didn’t necessarily have to be this way, if you think about it. The other reason for the other name for the imperial system is the English measuring system, and we here in America did have a whole revolution about not being like England.
We do speak English, so we’ve got that logic transition going for us. But there was a time when one, particularly Thomas Jefferson, was very strongly advocating for us to use the metric system. At the time of the revolution, as the time we were setting up the rules and regulations in this country, we were a lot closer to France than we were to England, and France was using the metric system already. Why didn’t we switch to that system?
Well, the answer is, pirates. Yeah, I’m really not kidding. I just learned this story recently, and it sort of blew my mind, so I thought it might be a fun thing to share. Jefferson was very French oriented. He’d studied and traveled and been a politician in France, and he thought that the metric system would be a very practical future, forward modern way for America to separate itself from England, and also just to have a more practical, modern future forward measurement system. So he had made arrangements to bring in a French scientist, a man by the name of Joseph Dombey, who was meant to come to Philadelphia and talk about international trade and how easy it would be for us to trade with Europe rather than England, if we use the Imperial or we use the metric system.
And he was going to be bringing along two particular objects, cylindrical, one kilogram copper weight, which would be the basis for the new American system of measuring weight, and also a copper rod that was exactly one meter, that would be the new basis of our meter long measuring system, but unfortunately, weather and pirates threw this plan into a cocked hat. He was blown off course on his way to America, ended up in the Caribbean and was captured by pirates, well by privateers, but anyway, he did not make it to Philadelphia when he was supposed to, and he did not bring the metric measuring units with him, and therefore we just kept on keeping on with the Imperial measurement system that people were used to already using, because we were largely an English colonial system.
So that’s why. That’s why, when I look over and see fun mid-century modern design things in Europe, and they’re all measured in meters and centimeters and millimeters. I have to do math in my head, and I have to google meters to inches, meters to feet, again and again and again. That’s why we’re constantly dividing everything by 12 when we’re doing DIY projects because of bad weather and privateers who stole the metric system that was supposed to be coming to the US at the behest of Thomas Jefferson.
For me, a past musical theater nerd, this immediately kicks me back into my High School’s production of A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum where there’s a major plot point that so and so was stolen in infancy by pirates. So was our measuring system stolen in infancy by pirates, and we never did get it back. It is not a famous general anyway, that is your fun measurement fact of the week. I’ve got a couple more in my pocket for the next few episodes. If you’ve got one, you’d like to share weird, curious, interesting, useful. I’d love to hear it. So shoot me a message at our email address, Della at mid mod midwest.com, or shoot it to me in an Instagram DM, mid mod Midwest is where you’ll find me there.
So yeah, all right, let’s get into it. Let’s start talking about breezeway to mudroom and everything that makes it good, great, or honestly, potentially not so good. So here we go. So as I say, This topic has been a blog post on the mid mod, bash, bash midwest.com blog for quite a while. But even though I feel it desperate. Lately is in need of an update. I had done more than just a DIY log of what I did on my house. I’m always interested in the context, in the design, why, in the historical why of making changes to mid-century houses, even when I was just sort of doing a documentary of what I was DIY on my house back in the early days, warts and all mistakes were made.
I painted a few things gray and some of my trim white and chose gray cork for the basement floor that I now would not choose today, but I made a lot of right choices, and I certainly gave a great deal of thought to the space planning and the history of spatial arrangements in mid-century houses. So let’s begin in our sort of conversation about breezeway to mudroom conversions, whether one is right for you by framing the issue. Pun intended, one of the major problems that mid-century houses often have is poor connections to the garage. If your house was built in the early 1950s it may never have had a garage, or it may have had a garage built completely detached from the house, or, weirdly, like mine, a garage that seems attached to the house, but there’s no way to get from the house to the garage without going outside.
This basically dates from a classic garage fear issue. We’ve always had concerns as an American culture about the danger of garages and rightly so. We store chemicals, we store gas in cars, we store cars in our garages, and they have more of a potential to cause problems, to cause health issues, than things, most things that we store inside of a house. So there are rules and regulations to this day about safe separation, fire separation and air separation between houses and garage, and back in the day, it was often not considered a good idea to connect the two at all other houses in my neighborhood have a house that’s built with a garage smack up against it, but there’s no connecting door between the two spaces. You have to come out of the garage door in the front or out through the man door in the back and then go back into the house through another door.
Most of the houses on my block actually are set up in exactly that way. Now, in my house, there was a different separation between them. There was a six foot wide breezeway between the house, which was built originally in 52 and the garage, which may have been built as little as a year later, but was certainly built in a separate installment. There is a unique paint color between the two in the attic space accessible from the garage. So that breezeway has a roof that today looks continuous across the front. It’s set down a separate style, but it’s roofed in the same material. But when it was done, it was clearly a separate project.
In my blog post, I’m highlighting an ad for a mid-century house that’s similar to mine, that has a similar arrangement of this might have been built. It’s an ad for a house with a garage already attached, but the house and garage are not actually attached. There’s a continuous roof line between them, but there is open space running from front to back, fully separating the house from the garage. And you can see that there’s actually pretty practical considerations to this. There’s nice views. It’s a covered space.
You could keep a grill there. You could keep trash cans there, and you have a gentle in this case, there’s a door that goes from the garage directly across the breezeway and into the house. In my layout, there was not you had to go out a door into the backyard, along a little sidewalk along the back of the garage, because it was the sort of kitty corner from the house backyard door and then back in the breezeway and into a kitchen door, which opened directly into the breezeway. But there’s, there’s a goal, to make a good connection here while also keeping safe separation between house and garage. Again, people, people were legitimately afraid that their cars might explode. My parents’ home when they first moved back to Madison. My sister is in high school. I never lived in that house, but that was a 19 teens, 1920s house, and it had a garage in its basement.
That was the garage was next to the house at a basement level. And to get from the garage into the basement, you had to go through a concrete wall and through like a bank vault door, a steel reinforced double sided door that was so heavy that it had this weighted pulley system that when it was wonky, you basically could not open or close that door. People had a very distinct fear of the things inside of garages, creating problems inside the house, and wanted that separation. So today, I think we’ve sacrificed that worry completely to the convenience gods, and we just want easy walking connections between the two of them, but, but yeah, so one of the solutions that people came up with was to just have the garage out back in the backyard, behind the house, and you drive along a little driveway.
As time went on again, the convenience factor. Came more and more important, and we got more and more commonly, an attached garage as built into the original part of the design. I should point out this early 50s plan that I highlight on my website for the blog post. Go check that out. Mid mod midwest.com/ 2201 was from the national plan service, and it is a breezeway that works better than the one that I found on my house for two reasons. One, it’s a little bit shorter. The garage and the house are slightly misaligned, so the breezeway space between them is only 16 feet long, and it’s a little wider than mine. It’s eight feet wide, rather than six feet wide. Both of those, to me, a it makes it a more functional potential future room, if the person who lived in this house wanted to enclose that space and b It’s a nicer space to hang out full stop.
When I moved into my house, I knew I needed to do something about this breezeway connection, because at only six feet wide and nearly 24 Yeah, 24 feet long, it simply wasn’t a pleasant place to be, poorly proportioned, strangely public to the street, while also not feeling private to itself. And it didn’t actually have the lovely flowing connection of coming out a kitchen door and going across the Bridgeway into the garage. Instead, you had to come out of kitchen door and walk around to the front of the house, almost out from under a covering roof, to get into the garage. I knew I was going to make a change. However, while it was, I was, I’m not going to say cursed, I was given I had, I chose for myself a house with a poor breezeway. I got really lucky in the potential modification the breezeway to mud room potential, because the house and garage were already linked by a shared concrete foundation and roof.
That meant that I didn’t even need to get zoning department approval to make my changes. Zoning department, I, of course, needed building permission, but I didn’t need to check that I was close to a lot line or make any sort of concerns about attaching the garage to the house.
Technically, from the city’s perspective, it already was, even though, functionally, for me, it was not so some neighbors of mine who have had similar layouts. This is a fairly common layout in the Midwest where people want to get from the house to the garage under rain or snow cover. Some neighbors of mine with similar layouts just enclose their breezeways with screen porches on both ends and then cut a door from the garage into that space. This is great, by the way, if this is all you want to do, if you just want to close in the two ends, it’s a lightweight and easy, DIY able solution for the cost of a new door, a few two by fours for the wall framing and some sturdy screening.
You can have a three season room that connects your house to your garage. Is more pleasant and private to hang out in. Can semi securely hold outdoor gear, boots and coats, things probably not valuables, but things that you would live out leave outside in your backyard, bikes, possibly depending on how you feel about your neighborhood. But you know, if you live in the Midwest, keeping your snow boots and coat outside of the heated envelope of the house can make for some very cold feet in the morning. It’s not the ideal solution.
So for me, I knew that I didn’t just want to turn my breezeway into a screen porch. I wanted a full breezeway to mudroom conversion. This was going to be essential to my plans, by the way. Pop over to the blog post mid mod midwest.com/ 2201 you’ll see the floor plan of the house as it was when I bought it, and not the floor plan of the house as it is, but the floor plan of the house as I imagined it would be in 2019 it’s interesting to me to look at it now and see that I have made, I have not made the choices I thought I would make in the office and kitchen, but I did pretty much exactly this with the former, with the breezeway to mud room. I did not create when I had had a breezeway. It was awkwardly only six feet wide by 24 feet long, just a weird proportion.
And instead of just chunking that up into a not long, oddly proportioned mudroom, I broke it up into some spaces with much more gracious proportions. So I knew I wanted to achieve three things in my conversion. One, I wanted to connect the house and garage. Two, I wanted to create a mudroom rather than walking straight into the kitchen. Another classic mid-century house problem is that there’s usually a kitchen door, and it usually brings you directly from the yard or the garage right into the kitchen, right into the cooking space. And there’s nowhere for sort of outdoor life collection of objects.
So I wanted a mud room, space to corral clutter, and I wanted to put laundry on the main level, something that, in fact, I have not done, but I could have, and I planned for that if your garage or your backyard or your front yard connects directly into this kitchen, you know how much of a priority it is to get some sort of drop zone into that kitchen door area. So from my perspective, both my front entry and my kitchen doors opened right into the living room, right into the kitchen. Very. Little extra storage area.
So with the best of intentions, I’m always cluttering up that entry with coats, boots, hats, bags, dog paraphernalia I really wanted. I’m gonna go ahead and say I needed a mud room to take the pressure off the existing kitchen. And I can say in retrospect, because while I have said this project is not done, it is workable. It has been livable and workable since 2019 it’s had the storage that I needed, it’s had the weather protection that I needed, and it’s had the place to keep all of my daily living junk and dog stuff out of the kitchen, and it has been a game changer for this house.
So a good breezeway to mudroom conversion requires some things that you won’t see in your classic Pinterest before after, how I did it, imagery. It’s more than just how to decorate your laundry area or the perfect mudroom boot storage solutions. Those are important, but those things come later. The structure requires a couple of key things. But actually, before I talk about the mudroom, end of a breezeway to mudroom conversion, let’s talk about a breezeway. You don’t necessarily want to get rid of a breezeway.
It might be useful. It might also serve as somewhat of an entry airlock, at least a bug free entry zone. It might still serve as a clutter catchment and be a little bit more of an outdoor things. It might be a place where outdoor backyard things can come in, under cover. A grill could be stored away. Outdoor yard furniture could be stored it still gives you a little bit of a level transition. It keeps snow out of your wash in space. But if you’re thinking about more of a weather airlock, more of a personal-your-daily-life-things containment, you’re probably looking for something more, less like a breezeway and more like a mud room.
Quick diversion into the history of mud rooms, the traditional farmhouse mudroom contained maybe a wash sink, perhaps laundry. I mean, back in the day of like a ringer, wash laundry, set up a chest freezer once they were around. I can really picture my grandmother’s Central Illinois, modest little house having sort of a, yes, it was a fully enclosed but it wasn’t fully heated space. Once it had been a porch, it was closed, and it had become a mud room, and it had a chest freezer, some extra storage, extra kitchen chairs that could be brought in when company was over, and a processing area to get out, to hang up the laundry, to dry on the line outside.
So all of those classic things, it also carries, the context of the utility entrance to the house, a mudroom is adjacent to a service entrance in a more class separated era, homes had multiple entrances for different types of people to come and go, guests and family members came and went through the front door, household staff and deliveries, and sometimes family members came and went through a back or a kitchen door.
I’ve talked about this in my Chicago bungalow episode, comparing the design of Chicago bungalows and how they’re like the last evolutionary step before the jump to the ranch, but Chicago, being an alley city, every home, every unit there, apartment or single family house or stacked row house, has a front door and a front entrance for coming and going and people who live in the House and then a delivery door at the back that opens into the kitchen, that has a space for veggies, for laundry, for milk to be delivered, for trash to be taken away, right up to the mid-century era, that’s more of a service door, a mud door, a mud room also carries a bit more of a rural context.
It’s not necessarily a servant’s entrance, but a dirty clothes, a dirty work entrance. It’s a practical space. So in the context of a mid-century house, it is also most often the connection between the house and the garage. And as we get into the 1960s past the early 50s build, you’ll certainly see not only a garage attached directly to a house, but sometimes attached to a house through a mudroom, which often in that context, contains some utilities, maybe the water heater, also the laundry, a utility sink, some storage, sometimes a household office, desk, and that is common even in a house without an attached garage.
Now I’m thinking of my grandparents, 1953 home in Racine, Wisconsin, which had a mudroom entrance, a kitchen adjacent entrance, but it had a detached garage and, in fact, a breezeway of a different type that my grandfather had created a covered walkway with angled slats that specifically deflected the chilly Lake Effect wind from blowing right through the house and creating a nasty wind tunnel. Good job, grandpa. All right, so back to the example of what I wanted to do in my house, and let’s generalize it to what you want to do in a mudroom to breeze in a breezeway to mudroom conversion.
You need a. To get to level, typically almost everywhere outside of California, anywhere you’ve got a basement under a house, anywhere you have any kind of water table or rainwater, adding up issues, the level of the ground outside the house and the level of the main floor inside the house are gonna be slightly different. And you’ll get up to the main level in the house, by at the front door, walking up a couple of steps to a stoop, to a porch, to a deck, and at the kitchen door, probably again, walking up a couple of steps that bridging the gap between outside floor and inside floor needs to happen smoothly.
You want to bring, ideally, your mud room up to the level of the house and either contain the stairs within that spot or bump them out to the outside or into the garage, if possible. In my case, what had been the access point, part of the reason you couldn’t go directly from the garage into the mudroom was that level change about two steps up, actually three steps up as I’m thinking of it, and I really wanted to have a flat transition from the kitchen out through the former kitchen door into the mudroom space. Though, this is a moment.
If you’ve got a chance to pop over to that blog post, you’ll see the floor plan of how I divided up my long, 24 foot long by six foot wide tunnel of space into three unequal parts. Those parts were at the back, a little bit of a covered porch area, a place to be under a roof cover, but open to the backyard in the middle, the mud room, which was interior to the house, completely insulated above, sides and below, and at the same floor level as the rest of the main floor. And then at the front of that space, a bonus garage storage area, which is now where I keep some of my most used tools and my trash and recycling hauled up two steps that’s fully open through a header opening to the garage itself.
So making my small garage a little bigger, not by making it wider or longer, but by taking some of the storage burden off the garage footprint itself. This division works perfectly for me, and I would definitely recommend some combination of these spaces turning into showing up on your to do list for your breezeway to mudroom conversion, rather than just turning the entire breezeway into a long, narrow room, thinking about breaking it up into several spaces that have a better proportion and serve different purposes.
So getting up to the level of the house now is split across those three purposes from the garage floor, which is three steps down from my kitchen house level. I now walk up one two steps up a step into another level to get to this auxiliary storage area next to the garage at the front of the former breezeway. This space is uninsulated, just like the rest of the garage, but fully weather sealed and rodent sealed from the rest of the outside world.
Once I’ve come up those two steps, I go up one more step and through an interior door, an interior exterior door, which is also a fire door. We’ll get to that in a minute, and up to the main level of the house. This also means for anyone who is having anyone with an accessibility issue, it’s not wheelchair friendly, certainly, but it does make the transition from one level to another to get into the house more gradual, and there are more opportunities to step up, have someone help you, brace you. There’s room for someone else to be standing next to you while you make those transitions and to catch a breath as you go from one space to another.
For anyone who has just sort of one leg that’s working better than the other, it works well in those contexts, and I can tell you, being blessed with pretty good accessibility my whole life, when I get back from a really long run and I’ve completely blown out my knees, and they’ve begun to stiff another cool down walk. I really appreciate taking gradual steps up into the house, by that means, rather than going right in, right up and in the front door. So getting up to level is step one. Some people will sort of have you walk directly in from the garage level and do some of your mud room things at ground level outside. But there’s two reasons that I recommend against that.
One, it leaves you to do more of your transition inside the new mud room space. And two, you can’t insulate properly underneath that if you’re dealing with a slab situation. So getting up to level, for me was a matter of raising the floor level of the breezeway up to the level of the kitchen, and that was perfect, because the second step you need to do if you’re transitioning a space from an exterior breezeway to interior conditioned space is to properly insulate. So I needed to wrap up and warm up the floor, walls and ceiling of this space.
In the end, I was lucky this. The new conditioned space was small enough that I didn’t calculate and nor did the inspector believe that I needed to add any additional HVAC to the space. I didn’t need any extra duct work or another unit. I had considered getting a small electric baseboard heater for the space, but in fact, it hasn’t really needed so. The new mud rooms, three walls and floor and ceiling are actually much better insulated against cold and heat than the rest of the house, because the energy codes have become much more stringent.
But I did actually have to calculate very carefully that I would be able to get the proper R value into just the thickness of stepping up one step between the, I believe, two by six joists that I ran across the space in order to fully separate. So what I did was I laid down an inch or was it two inches of rigid insulation right against the concrete floor, and then I floated floor joists across from the side walls of the garage to the walls of the house to the room joist of the house and put bat insulation between those so I had a really nice air gap and insulation separation on the floor. Put in my required R 19 around the three exterior walls, and then just stacked up insulation over top in the little attic space above the above the mudroom in in the little Gable of the garage area.
So all of that together got me to the proper warming up code. So now the mudroom space, if I was to fully close it off, I do occasionally confine Roxy to the mudroom if she’s being noisy while I’m on a call. And if it’s the dead of winter, I will notice that it’s marginally cooler in that room when I open it up than it was before. And certainly, if it’s cut off from the air conditioning, it will slowly start to warm up and become a little bit more still in the summer, but it holds its temperature very well with just one doorway open between it and the rest of the house. The third thing that people will often forget, and many mid-century houses are not to code, is that you need full fire separation between your interior spaces in your house and your garage.
This often means that in houses that had a garage added on after the fact, right against a kitchen door, again, in a lot of cases, they built it such there was no door walking between the house and garage. But my sister’s mid-century house was built had a DIY garage attached to it, and it had a glass door, a glass sort of kitchen view door, looking out into the garage. They could look out and see if the car was in there or not, cute, and it was a vintage door, however, that’s not fire safe. You need a one hour rated fire door between your house and garage to meet code.
So again, going back to the early days of cars, the fear of explosions, it’s not for nothing. Cars are still something that could more likely than a lot of things in your house catch fire, and we keep a lot of chemicals in the house that could be a danger. So it important that we meet code we have a proper fire door and thicker fire rated dry wall to keep the separation between those two spaces clean and clear.
That’s what’s necessary from a code and a safety perspective. Let’s talk a little bit about what’s a great idea for a mudroom from a design or a floor plan perspective, a good mud room needs, usually two doors. It’s a transition zone from somewhere to somewhere, so a door that brings you in from the outside or from the garage and a door that takes you further on into the house.
You want to think about the connection between those doors. It might be direct, or you might intentionally want to have it go a little bit circuitously so that there is space to sit down, or to have corners where you can get good storage going on. Pop into the blog post to see some of the process I put together. I had some process photos of removing siding and the scraping and the wall archeology that I did and how I framed and insulated. Also, there’s some cute Roxy pictures in there as I scroll through it, worth a peek. But what I was really thinking about as I was laying out this space was where was gonna be the space to stand?
Would there be standing room for me and Roxy, certainly. But also, when I have guests over, is there room for us all to stand in the mudroom while I wait for them to get their coats and shoes off, we make small talk. If I’ve had guests over and we’re all leaving the house together, is there room for everyone to stop in the winter and put on all of their layers? Is there also space to sit for at least me, but certainly multiple people would be nice to be able to sit and put on boots, shoes, tie up laces, just take a load off for a moment, if necessary, wait for other people to show up. And is there plenty of space to store things when you live in a house with multiple people, you might want to think about designated storage areas for each member of the House.
For families with little kids, it’s often a great idea to think about cubbies so there’s a designated place for each person. And you can say, you know, when you get home from work, backpacks get hung up on the thing when you’re looking for your homework. Well, why don’t you check your cubby? It’s nice if you’ve got a designated area to look for. Now, enforcing and learning and teaching that that’s another issue, but the house can help. If you’ve got designated spot, then at least you can ask if things have been put into it. So yeah, thinking about how is the. What’s the right amount of sitting space, storage space and standing room in your space?
Now, granted, you’re going to be constrained if you’re working like I am, between an existing house and an existing garage. You’ve got the six feet that you’ve got, but thinking about the flow between those spaces is beneficial when you’re making your wish list for what might happen in your breezeway to mud room conversion, you might also be thinking about bringing laundry upstairs. If there’s no other place on the main floor for it to go, you might think about it going into this space. You might also not classically in a mid-century era house, if laundry was coming up to the main floor from a basement, it would show up in a mudroom.
But that doesn’t seem as desirable anymore to a lot of people, mudrooms feel more like an outdoor transition zone, a place where you might not want to be barefoot. There might be grit on the floor from dirty boots. It might feel like it’s a little far from sleeping areas of the house where clothes are coming on and off. One alternative, though, to that is, if you are a house with a lot of sports equipment, a lot of coming in with dirty clothes from whatever work might be. Then, in that case, laundry in a mudroom is a really practical idea.
You might also think about more doors. You might want to come in from the garage and into the house, but then also go out to the front or out to the back. It can be a place where you keep, if not actually the grill, certainly grill equipment, patio furniture, other handy take it outside with you as you’re going out accoutrement. It might, very likely be a dog space any one hold that has any household that has dogs in it. I usually hear from the owners that they would like to have dog accommodating space, maybe even as much as a dog’s shower in a mudroom and storage, more storage, storage for different kinds of things.
But like I say, it doesn’t all need to be inside the conditioned area. You can certainly think about some of the space needs to be inside house storage, and some of it might be garage storage, some of it might be covered porch storage. That’s easier accessible to outside, but it’s going to keep porch furniture out of the snow in the winter. And you want to think about the esthetics of it all. In my house, I used the opportunity of enclosing the front of the breezeway to introduce a new material language to the house that slatted wall, which I then repeated in a little house numbers wall in front of the sidewalk, and that brought a material interest to my house that it really didn’t have otherwise. It was just simple siding, no brick, no stone, not even a difference in some vertical siding and some horizontal siding.
So I was able to sort of add in texture to the house as a bonus, as a twofer, more like a three for four fur or a five for really, in connecting the breezeway to the mudroom. So that’s another thing. If you want to pop over to the blog post, you’ll see how that looks. But I will say, in the matter of adding doors you want to think about, do you need a door to the front if you have if this breezeway to mudroom conversion is too close to your front door? I see a lot of houses where there’s a door to the mudroom and a door to the front door pretty much right next to each other. This can create entry confusion and also just unnecessary redundancy.
I have to say, I was very impressed by my neighbor’s choice as they created a small garage to mudroom to house conversion. They closed off their front door, turned it into a window, so you don’t, you don’t any longer enter their house into the living room. You enter it into the kitchen, which is a much more classic today, way to come and go through the house, just like I was talking about at the top of the episode. We once considered that family exclusively, and guests of the family use the front door and sort of service, or kids or wives doing food prep thing would go in and out through the kitchen door. But these days, it’s much more common that a front door does not get used at all, and everyone guests the UPS man and the family itself is going to use exclusively the garage or the kitchen or specifically, the mudroom door.
And that’s true in my house too. My family comes over. They have keys to my house, although they always pretend they don’t. They come in using the garage code and knock on the garage door from inside the garage. Nobody, nobody uses my front door except the mailman. So if this feels true to you, it’s true for a lot of my clients. I think it really is a common issue, and I think that it’s worth sort of wrapping your head around at this point, I feel like I have nattered quite a bit, and I’m also wondering if it would be better.
I’ve got a number of projects that I had in mind to talk about different configurations for mudrooms and entry points to the house. I may actually do that as a companion episode to this. So let’s call this part one of mudrooms, specifically the breeze room breezeway to mudroom conversion, part of mudrooms. And then I might turn around and do another companion episode, specifically on mudrooms and entry concepts for mid-century houses. Who would like to hear about that? If I may have this well recorded before you, before this particular episode goes to air, but if you have questions, if you are struggling with entry and mudroom issues.
This is something I work on in many, if not most, of my mid-century master plans. It is something that comes up regularly on ready to remodel Office Hours calls, and it’s something I would be delighted to assist you with in your own home remodeling journey. But if you ask really quickly, you might get your question in so it can be included in next week’s podcast episode, let’s see if that happens. So wrapping up this breezeway to mudroom conversion episode, I just want to talk about the idea that ultimately, what you choose for your house is going to be determined, to a certain extent, by the house, by what raw materials, layout wise, you are given, but also by your personal preferences and needs. Some folks really want to have everybody come and flow through the front door.
For others, the idea of letting a, any Tom Dick and Harry or B certainly, their dog dirty from the dog park, come in through the front seems like madness, and it is such a better idea to get all of that sort of air locked and passed through a mudroom entry. So I’m going to continue to talk about the features of great mudroom design and what I consider to meet my various clients’ needs in their various existing home configurations, with more or less dramatic interventions into the layout of the house next week, but this time, please head on back and find some of the imagery. I’ve got a bunch of my own progress photos, although I say not any after photos and the floor plan change that I made, plus some background on the history of breezeways and mudrooms and mid-century houses, all worth checking out at mid mod midwest.com/ 2201.
And I will also just say this is the perfect time if you’ve been thinking about how to make some bigger changes to your house, how to change the way you enter and leave your home as you flow in, how to think about the way that your kitchen is working and flowing and allowing you to be together and social with your family. If you’re thinking about how to make a little bit more square footage in your house.
Your house, how to add a bedroom, how to create office space or guest space, how to answer the question of how your growing family can expand out of the bedrooms they’re in and get more privacy while still maintaining space for an office and long term family guest space, if you’re stuck solving the issues around not loving the exterior spaces of your home, not feeling comfortable to go hang out on the back patio or grill, even though your family loves to eat from the grill in the summer.
These are all questions which can be solved with Master Plan thinking, and I would be delighted to welcome you into the ready to remodel program to work on creating your own master plan with guidance and assistance from me and the rest of your own mid mod remote squad, or to create a mid-century master plan for you and your family. Find out about all of those possibilities at our website or just reach out today and send me an Instagram message or shoot us an email.
Ask about the best way for you to get the design assistance you need to plan a really tailored and timeless remodel for your home. I know that you will value the changes that you make that transform a house from a container for your life into the home that really supports and uplifts the way you live in your house.
And next time on the podcast, more about the mudroom entry solutions that can help do just that as you enter and leave your house every day of your life. Let’s talk about it next week.