Mudrooms, Mudrooms and More Mudrooms

46 min readWe love our mid-century houses for many reasons – their enduring design, clean lines and great indoor/outdoor connections. But MANY mid-century homes, both modest and high end, share one glaring omission. They lack a proper mudroom. 

Good mudrooms are unfortunately rare in mid-century houses.

The process of leaving home and coming back has apparently gotten more complex since the mid-century era because … we have mudroom needs that time capsule houses just can’t meet.

Most of my clients come to me with homes that lack a transition zone that takes you from the sidewalk or garage into the house.

You probably do too. Even if you have a mudroom, it may benefit from an overhaul. So today, let’s take a tour of several past projects that need mudroom improvement.

By the way, this post has a companion post. Make sure you check out: How to plan a great Breezeway to Mudroom Conversion

Listen Now On 

Apple | Spotify | YouTube

Qualities of a good (GREAT?) Mudroom

Depending on how much space you’re working with, you may not be able to get every single one of these … and you’ll need to prioritize what matters most to you. But this list is a great jumping off point.

Every mudroom needs

  • standing room for everyone in the house that might be coming and going in a group,
  • sitting space for at least some of those people to put their shoes on and off and get ready,
  • storage space for all the things you need when you leave the house, but you don’t want to bring in or lose your inner spaces, the sunglasses, the gloves, the hats, plus bulkier items that need to be stored, like coats and shoes,

Plus you might want

  • storage space for any adjacent outdoor activities like grill supplies, cushions for outdoor furniture, back yard toys, etc,
  • pet lifestyle and cleaning supplies ,
  • laundry stations and supplies if your mudroom doubles as a utility room,

Plus, you’re going to want it to do something of the job of a filter or a container for outside detritus that’s mud on your shoes, dirt on your dog, things your kids bring with you. For pet households this might mean you have a dog washing station in a really grandiose, lovely mudroom. Or at least a clear place for everyone to wipe their feet before heading into the house

These are all generalities. 

Let’s talks specifics.  I’m going to walk you through several past master plan designs that have included a mudroom or house transition update. 

I bet you’ll hear some house situations and lifestyle needs in the following examples, that match your pretty exactly!

A classic mudroom problem (in an oddball floor plan)

This hexagonal hub house in northern Wisconsin does not have the classic ranch floorplan. But it does have an absolutely common mid-century house problem:

If there is any kind of mudroom or transition space in a house, it is almost too small to function.

The little room between garage and house here is basically just big enough to just swing all the doors that you would need to use to get in and out of it. And not big enough to do any of the things that you would want to do in a classic mudroom.

Swipe through the slider to see how we suggested either carving out an entry space from the interior footprint or building on a (small but mighty) lean-to mudroom to create a functional air lock entry!

If your “mudroom” is just the landing of the basement stair …

Somehow even more classic is the good old “entry from the garage is a tiny landing that threatens to let you fall right down the basement stairs.”

If this is your house … you’re in a tight spot, literally.

In cases like this we try to re-locate or separate the flow so that the garage to house connection has less work to do. For these owners, already used to entering and leaving through the front door, we focused on making a better landing zone in their living area.

Some Mid-Century houses were set up with livable garage spaces

This house also has the classic “fall down the basement stair” entry from the garage BUT the garage itself was already intended to start taking the pressure off the entry process.

This Minnesota house had an amazing garage. It had a lovely post and beam structure on the inside that was carried out through the garage space. The garage area had built in storage adjacent to the original quality of the kitchen built ins, and it had a little space heater.

So it was meant to be occupied kind of children’s play space / shop / family entry area all throughout the year

Our design schemes here all aimed to preserve that playful “party garage” effect while also adding a little more modern mudroom functionality (standing room, seating areas, and storage) to the entry process.

Wisconsin Dells house with a “family get together garage”

This time capsule house also had a garage meant to hang out in and host in.

The awkward hallway at the front door meant it was literally NEVER used. The homeowners and all guests went in the garage side door and then came into the kitchen. The basement stairs were built outside of the main house footprint because the original intention for the walk out basement was as a separate apartment for the young adult children of the original owner – the current owners’s parents!

Now that she wants to live in the house herself – and include the basement into her house space – we are changing up that entry pattern. Each of these options allows for a better entry flow, more mudroom and (when we eventually moved the stair for scheme 3) a much better connection to the basement!

What if the house HAS a mudroom but it doesn’t work well?

This house is on our project boards RIGHT now. And if you look closely you’ll see it has an original layout just like my house once did with a breezeway between the house and garage. And that in the past someone remodeled that breezeway into a dining room (at the back) and a tiny mudroom (at the front).

But it doesn’t WORK. It’s too small for an adult and two kids to stand up in, let alone for the whole family to flow through smoothly. We proposed three ways to expand it (just a little all the way up to turning that whole former breezeway back into an entry).

Which one works best for your life?

Special Case Mudrooms: what if everyone plays Hockey!?!

This is a house I like to point to because it gets at the specialized needs of specific families. Not only did this house not have a mudroom and NEED one. But it really needed a specific one because there were three sets of hockey gear that were rotating in and out of the house during every playing season.

While we added a mudroom at the garage entry, we also brought the laundry upstairs in this layout improvement. While I’m on the subject of laundry … this is a good place to remind everyone that keeping laundry areas central (not in an owners suite) means that families (even those with young kids now) can keep the work of DOING the laundry democratic as their kids grow!

Quick design tip for…framing and lumber

A two-by-four is not two inches by four inches. And you’re thinking, “Of course it is. Come on Della.” And I’m telling you it is not. 

Since the American Lumber Standards were adopted in 1924, a two-by-four should actually measure 1.5”x3.5”. BUT I’m also going to guess that the two-by-fours in your mid-century home (and mine) do not measure 1.5”x3.5”either.  You can read more about why right here!

This is a weird measurement fact, but it’s also a reminder that the lumber used in mid-century homes is very different in quality for the lumber you can get even at a good lumber store today, certainly from Home Depot. It is denser in grain. It is closer to the heart. It is milled from to a higher standard, from trees that were selected more carefully. It’s worth it to value the framing of our original mid-century homes. There is some value to keeping the walls and certainly the structure where it is, because those original two by fours are quite something. 

And certainly we can always think about changing the layout, changing the floor plan, removing walls, rearranging them when we’re remodeling! But if you’re doing a DIY project that involves two-by-fours, do choose with care. Today’s standard lumber yard two-by-four may bow, crook, kink, cup or twist. Those are five specific different types of definitional problems that could happen and I wrote a post to help you avoid them.

Resources 

  • Get Ready to Remodel, my course that teaches you to DIY a great plan for your mid mod remodel! 
  • Want us to create your mid-century master plan? Apply here to get on my calendar for a Discovery Call! 
  • Need some targeted home advice? Schedule a 30-minute Zoom consult with me. We’ll dig into an issue or do a comprehensive mid century house audit. 

And you can always…

Read the Full Episode Transcript

Good mudrooms are unfortunately rare in mid-century houses. I often struggle to understand this, because have we not always needed a transition space between outside world and home?

Although actually, our modern lives have gotten more complex. We walk and pick up after the family dog not just left them out the door. Kids come with way more accessories than they once did and even in my lifetime, I remember when I would leave the house in summer with a 20 and a paperback in my pocket, which feels crazy today.

So alright, it’s a changed need, but one way or another, most of my clients come to me with homes that lack a transition zone that takes you from the sidewalk or garage into the house.

Well, you probably do too. Even if you have a mudroom, it may benefit from an overhaul. So today, let’s take a tour of several past projects that need mudroom improvement.

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 2202 two.

Last week’s episode is kind of a companion to this one. I talked about how breeze ways function in classic mid-century houses because I was updating a blog post on homes that have my home’s exact condition, one I’ve seen in a number of other clients and student’s homes, by the way, where an original, no garage house had in a garage added on after the fact but not attached directly to the garage.

But there’s a transition zone of a breezeway between them. Now that breezeway may or may not be a gorgeous space for you that you like and use, even so you might find it’s more valuable to convert it to a mudroom in some cases, however, the poorly planned breezeway can be almost useless space in your house.

So it’s a complete net positive to transition it into a mudroom, and that’s what I did on my home, and I have never had a moment’s regret about it. So that episode last week is going to be a good one. If you have a breezeway, you’re thinking of converting, or if you have a house that once had a breezeway, that has been converted and could use improvement.

But today we’re going to talk more generally about the garage to House transition. If you have a house built later in the mid-century, era than my own, late 50s, early 60s, anytime since then, it will probably have an attached garage, and it will have that very common bubble diagram layout of a garage on one side of the house, bedrooms on the far end of the house, with a long face facing the street, and in the middle, the social area, living room, dining room, kitchen, the kitchen is probably going to be either at the front of the house or the back, looking at the street or the backyard, next to closest to the garage, and very likely you will have No transition zone whatsoever as you walk from the garage into the kitchen.

If so, you have a problem to solve, you need some sort of mudroom. Even if you have some sort of mudroom, my experience tells me that it has probably some room for improvement. So let’s talk today about entering your house, how to make that transition work well.

And I will be pulling examples from a number of master plan projects I’ve done over the last few years where we’ve made idealized solutions, or somewhat compromised solutions that don’t require too much time, effort or construction dust. So we’ll talk about the benefits, sort of cost benefit analysis, of making more or less change to your house to get some improvement or a transformation in your garage to kitchen transition zone.

The beginning of all of our design projects is me on a zoom call with you, talking through the pros, cons, the concerns, the scope, the scale of your project. To get that call started, go to our website, mid mod midwest.com, and find the work with us page, and there’s a button on there apply to work with us. It’s not a complicated process to apply. It’s just that we want to make sure that we’re having these calls.

Before we get into that, a couple of items of business, I will say, I’ve been I’ve been talking about it for the last few weeks. This is the moment in the year when people really start to think seriously about their fall and particularly their next year construction projects. So if that’s you, now is a great time to reach out and schedule a call with me.

I’m scheduling my time with people who are really close to the process of starting their master plan. But this is not a full assessment of everything that you could possibly ever want in your home. You do not have to have do not have to have every duck in a row. I just want to have a chance to know who you are a little bit what kind of house you’ve got.

When was it built? Is it in original time capsule condition, or has it been remodeled? What’s your goal for the place? Are you looking for tweaks or transformations? A few simple questions like that, let me know what kind of conversation we’re going to have. We’ll get you onto my call schedule, and then we’ll talk about, what does a master plan look like for your home. I would love to talk to you about what’s on deck for your house in this next couple of months and in the next couple of years, the right time to start thinking about making your house a home is always right now.

So I look forward to chatting with you if this is resonating. If you’re feeling like you’ve been putting it off for too long, let’s get the ball rolling together. And again, the process of collaborating to get a master plan from mid mounted West is about you feeding information about your house, about your style, about your needs to us and us generating options so that you can make easy decisions and then have clear information to pass on to contractors and get started.

It’s not about you knowing everything that you might ever want to have done to the house. That’s what we’re going to figure out together. So reach out as soon as you want to get that done. I will also say if you’re looking for more hand holding than design work done for you.

Now is also a wonderful time to jump in and join the ready to remodel program. And I mention this specifically because we had a fabulous monthly architect Office Hours call last week. Yeah, when this airs last week, and it was just, it was really satisfying. We had a student come back who’s almost at the conclusion of their construction process.

They have a few last loose ends to tie up, but they’ve had such a traumatic transformation in their house, a really successful process. And I often end those office hours calls by giving a little pep talk. And I had just I’d prepared more of the answers to the specific questions that were asked and didn’t have anything in mind, so I asked the room what pep talk are you looking for this week?

And she pointed out this, this student who’s at the end of her project, that it would be a really helpful reminder to everyone who is in charge of a process and how to sort of stand your ground and stay your course when you’re working with contractors.

So I ended up sort of spontaneously spouting one of my core beliefs on that call, which is that an ideal relationship with a contractor is not as versatile. You want to work with a general contractor who feels like your friend, who feels like they are, a competent professional who’s organized and moving forward, but at the end of the day, you are the arbiter of what’s going to happen in your house, and you are the person who most closely cares about how it’s going to turn out. It’s not to say that a good contractor doesn’t care about the results.

They do. They want you to be satisfied. They want you to walk away happy. They want you to recommend them to other people, but their sort of wake up in the morning goal is always to do things the most efficiently. That often means the way they’ve always done it before, and to sort of knock off one item after another in order until the project is done. That efficiency is to your benefit, but also sometimes it’s really important to pick a few areas where you don’t want to make the most expeditious decision.

You don’t want to choose the material that’s in stock that you don’t love over one you’d have to wait a couple of weeks for because you’re going to live with that material forever. You don’t want to choose the default builder, grade cabinet, finish when it’s really important to you. One of the most prominent elements of a finished mid-century remodel is, did we nail the built ins? Are they the right stain color? Do they have the right grain? Do they have the right detailing at the corners?

So pulling together some of those key points, choosing your battles and choosing where to know this is, this is a stand I’m I need to insist that we reevaluate this. If you’re telling me that there’s no other options, I’d like you to think like you to think about a little longer and find an alternative I am willing to pay a little more for this is often a statement that has to go along with that, but this is a really important thing to remember throughout your remodel process, and even if your remodel process is long in the future, it’s not too soon to start sort of seeding that idea into your brain.

So anyway, I just, I loved getting that request from her. It’s something that I had, I already talked about with her in the past, and she had chosen some really meaningful to her stands to make and in other cases, just moved smoothly along. Trusted her contractor, trusted the process, gotten the results that weren’t as important to her, but I loved that she asked me to reiterate that I thought it really, really speaks to the value of taking the time to do master plan, thinking for yourself, with someone else, with an organization like mid mod Midwest, and then communicating clearly to the people you’re working with what matters most to you, so that you can really get a result you care about.

Okay, so that’s maybe, that’s a little bit of a I guess I just needed to transition that pep talk to everyone. I want everyone to know this. I want everyone to believe that their home deserves this. 

I also, I had a weird measurement fact queued up as well. So I’ll go ahead and share that. I thought this might be a fun day to remind you that a two by four is not two inches by four inches. Why is it not?

Well, inflation, I guess, the history of building studs is that, you know, until the mid 1800s Slumber for buildings was produced locally by sawmills to no general specification. It was the request of the individual builder, or sometimes the whim of the mills equipment and employees. Builders were used to working with whatever their local mill regularly offered, and there was no standardization between one sawmill and another. But as time went on, forest resources were depleted, the milling operations took place further and further from the building site.

Eventually, there wasn’t a relationship between the person who was milling wood into timber, into lumber, and the person who was putting that lumber into a building. So there had to be a rough standard by 19 102 inches was the most common thickness for joists, rafters and studs and one inch for boards like floorboards. And eventually sawmills began to run rough. They would do a rough cut first, and then they would do it through an edger or a rip saw to smooth the edges. With a side effect that the new saw sized pieces were usually a quarter inch less than the nominal width.

So it was cut rough cut to two inches and then smooth down to one and three quarters. I most commonly see mid-century studs as being more like one and three quarters width, which is interesting to me, because when I originally did the research for this back for a blog I kept for fun post graduate school. Yes, I have always been a building nerd. And if you want to check it out, the URL is as if people mattered.wordpress.com. You could go check it out. I have a long post there. I’ll link in the show notes to the humble two by four blog post.

But according to this research I did 15 years ago, the American lumber standards adopted in 1924 created a standard of one and a half inch two by fours. So that’s not actually my experience. This is an interesting thing. If you want to go down and look in your own basement, take a tape measure to the joists in your ceiling, see what they actually the actual dimension, not the nominal dimension is, but one way or another. This is, this is a weird measurement fact that a two by four is not two inches by four inches.

But it’s also a reminder that the lumber used in mid-century homes is very different in quality for the lumber you can get even at a good lumber store today, certainly from Home Depot, it is denser in grain. It is closer to the heart. It is milled from to a higher standard, from trees that were selected more carefully. So, really, it’s worth it to value the framing of our original mid-century homes. And certainly we can always think about changing the layout, changing the floor plan, removing walls, rearranging them when we’re remodeling.

But there is some value to keeping the walls and certainly the structure where it is, because those original two by fours are quite something anyway. So I will go ahead and link to that, which also has a handy guide to what to look out for when you’re choosing from the lumber yard. 

Today, if you’re doing a DIY project that involves two by fours, choose with care, because your standard lumber yard two by four may bow, crook, kink, cup or twist. Those are five specific different types of definitional problems that could happen.

So be on the watch for what’s wrong with your two by four and leave out the bad ones. They’re gonna be someone else’s problem. I will link to two blog posts on two by fours in the show notes, if that’s the kind of nerdery that amuses you, and if not, let’s move on to more practical daily life considerations of how to make a better mudroom for your mid-century home. Here we go.

So let’s do a quick recap of last week. I was talking less about mudrooms in general and more about the specific, although fairly common in a mid-century house situation of an aftermarket garage added to a house and separated by some sort of covered entry or breezeway, and then what you can do if you’re in that situation, to make a good transition between your house and your garage.

I did list off some of the qualities of a good modern mudroom, and those are, let’s see quick recap, standing room for everyone in the house that might be coming and going in a group, sitting space for at least some of those people to put their shoes on and off and get ready storage space for all the things you need when you leave the house, but you don’t want to bring in or lose your inner spaces, the sunglasses, the gloves, the hats, plus bulkier items that need to be stored, like coats and shoes.

Now, how many of each of those things you store at the door does depend a little on how much space you’ve got. You might need to be rotating in and out summer and winter gear, or even summer, fall, spring, winter gear, but ideally you want to have more than one coat and one pair of shoes per person able to be stored here and then storage or transitional space for outdoor yard things like grilling or outdoor cooking equipment or the fabric for. Finishing for your outdoor chairs, other backyard items you want to keep inside when you’re not using them outside.

Now, plus, you’re going to want it to do something of the job of a filter or a container for outside detritus that’s mud on your shoes, dirt on your dog, things your kids bring with you. So this might be for pets. It might have a dog washing station in a really grandiose, lovely mudroom. Possibly the crate lives out there, or crates, maybe laundry lives in the mudroom. Now, these are all generalities, and I will probably talk a little bit more about them towards the end of the episode, because I’m just still going to be continuing to think about what makes a good mudroom.

What you might want to include, if you’re dreaming big about mudroom type space in your house, but let’s today focus on the specifics that I didn’t have time for last week, I want to walk through several past master plans with very different conditions that have included a mudroom or a House transition in the update, and I am willing to bet that you will hear some situations and some lifestyle needs that match your experience and your goals pretty exactly.

So I’m actually going to start by one of the more oddball floor plan houses I’ve worked on recently, a house in the form of a hexagon, but it is classic in its lack of transition space challenge. So by the way, if you want to see any of the examples of this, I’m going to go ahead and pop some quick floor plan polls into the show notes page for all of these. So this house up in northern Wisconsin, and it came with a really interesting original layout, a core social area built around a hexagon, a central fireplace in the middle, and then sort of social spaces around a little more than two thirds, maybe around two thirds of the hexagon space.

And then the kitchen and back door access tucked into the back of the hexagon, behind a little storage unit, then a wing of bedrooms and utility stuff springing with square shapes off one side and a garage springing off another side of hexagon. I think originally, this house had been designed so you entered directly from the garage to the house. But at some point, someone decided to close off a little bit of a transition space, but because of the weird angles, it was tiny, awkward and filled with doors.

So this one really strikes me as being a classic. If there is any kind of mudroom or transition space in a house, it is almost too small to function. It’s basically just big enough to just swing all the doors that you would need to use to get in and out of it, and not big enough to do any of the things that you would want to do in a classic mudroom. So in this case, we suggested one of several possibilities for them.

The first suggestion we actually made was we had considered repurposing what was a garage wing into residential space, and this meant building a new garage, slightly detached from but very close to the existing house, and then putting a covered walk zone between them, basically bringing it to the situation my house was as a starting point, a breezeway to walk from one space to another with a slightly better shaped, Although still quite small, mudroom, transition between them.

My better solution, my preferred solution, was to add on a small mudroom space beyond the existing footprint, extend the roof line and make room for a small but functional room that you could come from the garage into this room and then go back into the house to get a clean air lock entry to the house, and also so it could be this house didn’t have a very defined front door, partly because it was built in the country and it was playing more with its fun, curious hexagonal shape.

But as the new owners took it over, they just realized that none of their guests ever knew which door to walk up to, because it was also very generously appointed with Windows and sliders, and people just tended to, particularly the UPS. Folks tend to just approach any of the doors or windows of the house as an entry point, rather than recognizing the front door, since it was pretty modest and undefined. So building out an added entry slash mudroom space for this house was really my preferred suggestion for them. It gave them room to do all of the things you need to do, standing room, storage room for them, the two owners and guests, and also an airlock to prevent winter air from flowing straight into the house when you open the door. And also a defined space to say, Hello, this is the front door. Look here.

The last option we created was again to rebuild a new garage and just create a more generous transition zone between directly between the house and garage, leaving a less defined front door, but still doing a few of our front door improvement curb appeal tricks, to highlight it with a color, with some light fixtures with a little bit more of a you are here. Year, please walk this way, wayfinding pattern and also still room to have a bench, some hanging storage and standing room inside of a mudroom. So I’ll pop all of those examples into the show notes page.

Now you may have an even more classic and even more challenging solution or situation in your house, your garage to House transition, if basically what you have is a door that swings open from the garage right at the head of the basement stairs going down, and then you have to turn in a direction to get into the kitchen. That was certainly the case in another project. This was a Madison, Wisconsin home built in a modest era, and not too dissimilar from my own home, except that I happen to have a little bit more space, so I’m not likely to walk sort of trip in the door and fall right down the stairs.

But this is something that happens in modest mid-century homes, and if this is you, there’s not a whole heck of a lot you can do to get standing room, sitting room and storage for everybody’s coats, boots and utilities for every situation into that tiny space. You’re instead going to be focused on, how can you make that space safe, to prevent the walk in the garage door and fall down the stairs situation for yourself, for guests, for people coming in loaded down with gear in the dark or late at night. And you’re going to think about, what are the little things you can do to mitigate that. So in one of our schemes for this particular house, we created a tiny, tiny mini mudroom effect at the kitchen entry by just having a bench seat built into some kitchen cabinets so that there was a place to sit and kick your shoes off and then probably hanging storage for coats along the wall.

It’s not great, but in this case, basically, we decided with the owner that it was more effective for them, since they felt so unsafe coming and going through that door to just walk around from the front of the garage and go in and out their front entry door. And so we focused more on creating a better mudroom transition zone right in their entry area. This house also had the classic mid-century living room quality of a door that opened directly into their main living space, and then you walk right across in their orientation the TV wall cutting off a view of anyone who was sitting on a sofa looking at that. It might also be you’re walking right across in front of a hearth.

And we were able to slightly improve upon the layout by taking out what had been sort of a classic, inconvenient front hall closet and replacing it with a space to sit some real functional storage and making that work better. So for them, ultimately, the solution was not to come and go through that garage door, other than when they were dropping off groceries, and to make the housework better. If this is you, if you have a really precipitate connection between your garage to house entry and a stair going down, a lot of people will ask, is it possible to move the stairs?

And that’s a fair question to ask. It is always possible, but moving a staircase is an expensive proposition, and so generally, we recommend that owners in this situation try to live with it, and if we if possible, we might look to make more room inside the garage to do a transition in there, or create an alternate pathway that you’re coming into the house through, move that door rather than move the stairs, because moving stairs is generally going to be costly, per the effect that you get out of it labor intensive, and can sometimes trigger some fairly dramatic code issues.

There are modern codes about headroom and stair tread, height and depth, which are slightly more stringent than they were in the mid-century era. And so even just a few inches, different means if your stair exists, it’s grandfathered. It’s not going to cause any problems, by the way, this reminds me, I’m going to be doing an episode on modern code, and when your home may be grandfathered into some situations that you would like to leave alone. And when, on the other hand, it’s worth it to make a change like this.

So I’ll just if this is you, I’ll point you. If you feel like what you do is walk in your house directly facing a staircase, do check out this example and see if anything that we’ve suggested for this client triggers some useful solutions for you, there are okay. So if you’re thinking about how to prioritize your transition, I’ll ask you to I’ll ask you to ask yourself some of the questions that I always ask my clients before we get started with our mid-century solutions packages.

So in our earliest design meeting, our kickoff meeting, I am always going to ask them some questions about how you enter and exit your house. Do you come in and go through your front door? Some always, never, or is the garage door or perhaps the kitchen door, your daily mode of entry is there? Difference between when you use one door or your guests. Do you use different doors at different times of day? How do all the people in your household respond to your doors?

Some people might use a front door to walk out of the house with a dog, to walk in the neighborhood in the evening, but never to actually leave the neighborhood, never to get in a car and go via the front door. So thinking about who’s using what door, when can help you think about what you need to site in terms of storage and access space by those doors. I also always ask about pets. If you have pets that you’re letting out, are you always walking them on a leash? Are Do you have a closed in yard that you’re happy, that they are happy to go out into? If so, where is that in your house?

So for some people, as we talk about, you might have pets going in and out through a mudroom space. So that space needs to have a place to wipe off muddy feet, possibly even to wash a dirty dog. That might be the most logical place for a pet crate. But if you’ve got, for example, a ranch that is one story at the front of the house but has a walk out basement down a hill at the back, and you’ve got a fenced backyard you’re letting your dog out into.

It might be that the dog qualities of mudroom are divorced from your entering and leaving, so the place where you come and go to the car is not the same place where you’re letting a dog out into the yard and where a dog is perhaps most likely to come back into your house covered in rainy mud. So I’ve definitely had clients who have wanted to create kind of a dog mudroom in the basement, which is easy. There’s more storage space down there. It’s pretty easy to get access to plumbing, to set up a dog shower, all that sort of thing. If you know that’s the place where you’re most often letting your dog in and out.

That said, while it’s convenient to go downstairs inside your house to let a dog in and out, as opposed to say, walking them fully outside, sometimes people don’t want to be walking down to the basement stairs every time their dog whines, they would rather have a way to let them out at an upstairs Deck level with stairs that the dog can get down to get outside. So thinking about again, the age of your dog, its mobility, how you feel about letting it in and out, how often you’re doing this. All of these are questions that we ask when we’re dealing with a pet family.

We also, I can make some assumptions about climate zone based on the address of the home that I’m working on. If I’m talking to someone in California, I’m going to make different assumptions about how they want to air lock their mudroom, versus someone in the Midwest who’s got harsh winters and humid summers to deal with. That said, I’m still curious about how my individual, this client, feels about how their house relates to the outside climate. So thinking about for you, do you care? Do you worry about indoor air quality? Are you trying to create a space to air lock so that cold breezes or hot humidity or even wildfire smoke, something I’m thinking about this week, as we’ve got a lot of it in Wisconsin, again, don’t necessarily flow directly into your house.

So you could do sort of you walk in one door. This is what an airlock means for anyone who doesn’t you walk in one door. Now you’re in enclosed. An enclosed space. Now you have a chance to regulate your temperature, then you open another door and walk into the house. There’s no direct airflow from one to another. This is particularly handy for people in a Midwestern winter trying not to lose all their expensive, probably gas powered heat or even valuable solar gathered heat out the door every time you come and go.

What else do we regularly ask? Oh, you’ll I will always want to know about how you come and go from your house via foot or car or other modes of transit, bikes, for example. We want to think about again this kind of comes to who’s using what doors when? But it’s another way to ask the same question, and sometimes it’s a really helpful way to get at that. And then when we start to think about garages and the car to outside life transition, I always want to know if the garage itself might be a place where you choose to hang out.

Now, this might be a thing you do, because historically, when you were growing up, you hung out in your garage. You might be a garage hangout person, because you use that as a workshop space to work on cars or woodwork projects. There are also just places in the US where it is cultural and normal to hang out in the garage. And this may also have to do with the quality of the garage itself. It may have been designed as more of a hangout space. Now the concept of a party garage is sort of a modern luxury home concept. I hear a lot of people talk about it in renovations.

Do we want to do anything inside the garage to put in a fancier floor finish? Do we want to put in some kitchen quality cabinets that could be food storage or putting out display items. Are we doing intense craft work out there? Do we need to insulate and heat a garage? Now, in some cases, I’ll just have a client who says, Well, I’m just going to hang out in the garage no matter what I mean, perhaps even if I’m asking questions about, do you need a screen? Screen porch. Do you need a covered patio area? I will occasionally hear from homeowners, Oh, no. Well, we’ll just put the garage door open, hang out there. It’s got a great view. That’s a good sunset view. That’s a good sunrise view. I like garages.

So in that case, there’s little to do other than make sure that we’re tidying away any storage detritus in the garage, and then it’ll be on the homeowner to be more or less fastidious about how they keep that garage space up. But this is also a great vintage idea, and we find I’ve had a couple of houses come along where the garage space was clearly always intended as valuable hangout space.

Here’s a more intense example. This Minnesota House had an amazing garage. It had a lovely post and beam structure on the inside that was carried out through the garage space. And so that post and beam structure kind of is the cue that the garage is not second class space, but all their cues were had a nice quantity of Windows. It had built in storage adjacent to the original quality of the kitchen built ins, and it had a little heater.

So it was meant to be occupied kind of children’s play space all throughout the year. In this case, I think it was pretty easy to see popping up to that, to that drawing that this original floor plan, in fact, this garage had a two car garage accessed from the front and then probably added on, although possibly original, a second garage that connected to the first one, but accessed from rather than pulling straight up to the front door of the house, pulling around on a sidewalk and are on a driveway and then coming in at a perpendicular angle. And that one had more of a workshop quality, but it was pretty clear to see that maybe the original owners had thought of this as a children’s play space in the winter or parties could be thrown here. There was a direct connection.

Again, this was a house where, for all the effort that had been put into making the garage space itself really lovely, the door from the garage to the house walks you in directly to the top of stairs, flowing down one of those you walk in the garage door and you’re worried about falling right down the stairs situations. So for us, it was definitely a priority in our remodels to think about preserving the cool quality of this garage. We didn’t want, ideally, we didn’t want to have to knock it down and rebuild it because it had a structure that it wouldn’t feel cost effective with modern construction to make it as interesting as cool, to expose post and beam structure like that inside of a garage.

One of the things we did was because the garage itself was quite pleasant and already had bays for three cars, was to think about, what if only one of the family’s regular cars was parked in there in the main area? We kept the shop area at the back, and we just added in a covered parking area, sort of a carport area outside of it, so that some of that nicely configured interior garage space, somewhat temperature controlled, even in Minnesota, could become a sort of garage area mudroom, a place for shoes and coats and whatnot to be stored.

Now they would not be kept at the temperature of interior condition space there, but it would definitely take some of the burden off inside the house, the coming and going, and it would give a place for all the family with small kids, all those sort of shoes and toys and backpacks and things to live in a space that was totally protected from the elements, totally protected from outdoor critters, but was sort of secondarily connected to the house.

The next thing we considered was, could we carve out some of that garage square footage and create a specific, small transitional mudroom from the garage footprint? This could be fully conditioned space that could be treated like interior air. It could be warm, it could be dry, and it wouldn’t be right next to cars. It would be sort of separate from car space.

And then the third option really was to extend, to build out an addition on the garage, to sort of shift the entire mass of the garage away from the house and have room for a classic, generous built in friendly mudroom. This also gave us room to pop in a powder room and to expand the kitchen footprint at the same time. So all of this, you know, this is a lot of work, to dig out new footings, to dig out new foundations, to expand the conditioned area of the house, but with a big reward, a big return on that investment, to have room for a powder room that wasn’t in the private area, and room for a more generous and casual transition into the house.

And now no one is worried about coming in through a door that falls right down the stairs. It’s classic. I like, really, what was anyone ever thinking about this? Generally, I think what they were thinking was that door to the basement will always be closed, and so you’re just coming into a constricted area. But if as many, many mid-century homes, do you create living space in the basement, it’s often likely that you’re going to want to create a more open transition flow down to the basement and keep those that stairway open all the time, which then brings you right to too many people pile in through the garage door at once, and the little one says, roll over, and someone falls right down the stairs.

So yeah, I think this house had some really interesting examples of small, medium and large solutions we could try to take the burden off that entry, to create more storage space around it, and just to make a pleasant living space. Also at the back of the house, we were also playing games with a screened in, or, as it turned out in the last example, a fully four season living space that tucked into the corner of the garage.

So the other thing to think about when you are thinking about carving out or enclosing spaces, are you projecting off the front of the house? If you aren’t too close to your front setback to do that, are you projecting off the back of the back of the house. Are you creating kind of a mudroom transition that leads you out to the backyard, or are you connecting sort of between the house and garage in the footprint area of the existing house? How are you also going to create opportunities to create a better entry at the front and a better connection to the backyard at the back?

So looking at the examples for this Minnesota House with the finished garage, I think is a really interesting one another, much more modest home that had a similar it was always a party garage. Is a house design we did recently, or what is time? Maybe not quite that recently, but up in the Wisconsin Dells area for a woman who was taking over her grandparents’ mid-century home.

Now, the interesting history of this house was it was built. It’s a classic, super modest, although super darling, every detail very precise and well calculated, clearly built as a labor of love, but snug, snug, snug, small rooms that was meant by the original homeowners who built it. I’m blanking on the date, but some date, sometime in the early 50s, they built it with a walkout basement with a very high ceiling and a nice enclosed second hearth on the basement level, intending that they’re young adult children, their recently married. I believe daughter and her husband and child could live down there. Now. They never did. They never did actually finish that space out as a second home, but it was meant to be sort of whatever a daughter in-law suite or a son-in-law suite below the house, same footprint, and so the stairs to the basement are actually outside of the footprint of the house. They’re in the in the garage footprint, and they so you could come in, you could go into the garage door, and you could either walk from the garage into the kitchen door of the main house upstairs, or you could go downstairs that were inside the garage and go into another door and into the basement. The garage itself, though, was insulated lightly, but it was also connected to the whole house, radiator heating system, and man this had its original 1950 whatever, boiler system. And when I came out to field measure the house,

it had been unoccupied and cold, and the new homeowner, the daughter of the granddaughter of the original owners, came in and sort of got the house running. And by the time I had gone through and taken all the photographs, it was toasty everywhere, including inside the garage. Now this garage had always, in her memory, always housed a classic car, some sort of beautiful colored, round cornered, sort of 19 late 40s Chevrolet something, and it would be pulled out for events. But this was clear that this space had been a family party location.

This was the house where family reunions and get togethers and summer picnics were always held. And I found some things. There was sort of a work bench on either side of the garage, and I found some clamped on or permanently attached items, including a device I couldn’t identify until I asked the internet, it looked like maybe a meat grinder. And eventually we figured out it was an ice grinder for making ice for drinks at parties. There was they clearly would set up like a dry bar at this workbench whenever there was a family party going on. So this space was clearly meant to be hung out in as a social space, as a hosting space, and also was a pride and joy hangout space for the grandfather who originally built the house. He would hang out there, tinker on his car in his nicely radiator warmed garage and just enjoy life with a beautiful window view on both sides and glass in the garage door at the front. Why am mentioning this?

Okay, so in this case, for the new owner, she was not planning to hang out in her garage as much. She wasn’t super handy, and she did want the basement to feel interiorly connected to the house. She was going to need to go down there occasionally, the laundry was down there, and she didn’t really want the sensation of having to step outside the house to get into that basement. So we explored a couple of different options for better connecting the house and garage for one, oh, the other, quality of this house was weirdly the front door, which no one in the family had ever used in her living memory, was small and awkward and walked into a three foot wide and probably 15 foot long, narrow hallway where you walked straight between two walls with no option to turn for at least eight feet, and then you could turn and go into the kitchen, or you could carry on and go left to the bedroom wing, just really an inhospitable space.

The to walk up to the door and greet someone, you would then have to sort of back away from them to allow them to enter the house beyond you. So no one ever used that space. They always came in into the garage at a side door, which, again, was located very close to the front door. I think I talked last week a little bit about the problem of if your casual entry door and your formal front door are too close together, it can be confusing. It can be redundant, and I really salute the decision my neighbors made a couple of years ago to just remove their front door, replace it with a window, and acknowledge the reality that everyone was coming and going through their kitchen, mudroom door at all times.

But in this case, we didn’t remove the front door entirely, but we definitely considered sort of downgrading, well, first off, improving its quality, or downgrading it’s important to the space. So in the first version, we just, we tried to make it slightly more hospitable by removing the solidity of the wall that cut it off from the kitchen space, and putting in a slant wall there, so when you walk in that narrow corridor, at least you can see beyond. You can see into the living space of the house. But we also pushed out the formal boundary of the house just enough to enclose the stairs going to the downstairs area to the basement and a little bit of a transition zone at the top to make that part of the interior area of the kitchen, rather than part of the exterior area of the garage, in a more dramatic scheme, because it was a really long garage, we just took away the sort of closest to the house, eight feet of the garage.

I believe, in this case, we needed to expand the garage forward a bit as well to fit a modern car. But it was really going to be worthwhile to get a mudroom space with place to sit down, to move your sort of store, your coats and whatnot, to take your shoes on and off, and then able to walk again into the interior condition space of the house. And then, in the third version, we actually ended up popping a necessary powder room out into that area. Not the least expensive thing we could do, because we would have to do a little bit of breakthrough construction to get the plumbing drop in there, but we actually ended up making sure that the toilet drop was going to be in the cavity of the former staircase.

And in that case, I just told you, it’s expensive to move a staircase in a house, but in this case, we decided it was necessary if she really wanted to be able to feel like her stair, her basement life was connected to her upstairs life. We needed to move the stair to a more central location of the house, and in that most grand scheme. You know how I love to do schemes one, two and three The least you could do, up to the most dramatic move you could make, we actually sacrificed a bedroom in order to get the footprint for putting U shaped, rather than a straight run of stairs into the main area of the house, right off the dining area, right in the center. We ended up putting another bedroom, a guest space, into the basement so she didn’t lose a bedroom.

And in fact, we get a much better connection all the way throughout the house, if it sounds like by the way, I’m talking to you about mudroom Solutions, and I’m getting into you move the staircase and where are bedrooms in the house. That’s because one of these things is always connected to all of these things, the choices you make, even in how to expand or contain or create a little bit of new bedroom space, are going to go hand in hand and sort of connect to the bigger or smaller moves you’re making around the house, you’re going to take the pressure off of one room by shifting some of its purposes to another space, and that’s going to mean it’s easier for you to treat another room as more high priority or less high priority space.

So this is an episode about mudroom layout solutions. It’s got a connected blog post with a lot of floor plans of mudroom transition areas, but it also in each one of those you’re gonna see, I’m not just showing you a floor plan of a mudroom. I’m showing you a floor plan of the social and entry spaces of the house, probably including the kitchen, possibly including the living room, certainly including the garage. So I don’t see these spaces as UN. Connected, in fact, to connect, to create a good mudroom that connects the garage in the house, the outside world to the inside world. We’re interested in more than just that little sliver of transition zone. We’re interested in how you live inside the house and what you do outside the house.

So let’s see what else did I have on my list of examples? Oh, here’s a situation that I definitely wanted to address in this episode, which is, what if you already have a mudroom, but it doesn’t work well. And this one, I may not have images to show you yet, because it’s a project we’re working on right now, and we’ll be delivering it to a client soon. But in this case, I think I mentioned it last week because they have a former breezeway that had been converted into both a dining room and a mudroom. It’s just the same as in my house. There was a house then about eight or 10 feet away from it, a garage been built, then a roof extended between the two spaces, and at some point, someone had fully enclosed that space and turned it into interior space, heated it, put in interior materials, and called it good.

However, they didn’t do a great job. They basically were thinking only about, well, I think they were particularly focused in that moment on dining room. So they maximized the amount of space with the dining room, although it is one step down from the rest of the house, there’s then another step down from the dining room into the sort of at the front of the house, a mudroom entry. And it’s too small. It’s very constricted. It also has doors coming from both garage and the front outside. And so you this family, you they find themselves having little traffic jams there all the time. There’s not enough room to swing the doors open and close. There’s never enough room to put everything, and there’s not even enough room for the whole family to just stand there as they prepare to transition out to the car and leave the house. This is extremely inconvenient.

So as we are thinking about what to do in that space, we are considering, do we need to shift or expand the footprint of the garage? That’s one of the requests they had. Do we move the dining room to another part of the house so we can take some or even all of that former breezeway space for mudroom or for a mudroom and sitting room combination, or for mudroom at the front and then a flow out to a screen porch or a three season room at the back, kind of scenario?

And do we, in any scenario, want to bring laundry to that space, which, right now the laundry is in the basement. This is maybe, on paper, one of the most logical things to do, to bring the laundry to the mudroom. But this really gets to the question of to laundry or not to laundry in a mudroom. Here again, if you’re asking this question, Della Should I put laundry in my mudroom? Should I keep laundry in my mudroom? I’m going to ask you a series of questions,

what is the makeup of your family? How old is everyone? When is laundry being done? Who is doing the laundry? And I particularly want to ask that question and then caveat it to families with small children. Sometimes we hear from people who don’t enjoy having their laundry, for example, far, far from the bedroom. The mudroom is often across the entire social area from the sleeping areas in the house. And people will say, Okay, well, we’re going to put in an owner’s bathroom in this remodel, let’s just go ahead and throw the laundry into our owner’s bedroom. It could go in the closet. It can go in the bathroom. We’ll put it into our room.

This can feel very logical, particularly people who are doing their laundry in the daytime, not after bedtime, who have small kits. But I highly recommend reconsidering this if you are anticipating that you want to grow your kids up into people who take care of some of their own chores, you don’t want to isolate the laundry into one person’s domain or one couple’s domain in the house if you’re hoping for an entire family structure to be doing their own laundry independently. So that is one reason to think about it being in a mudroom. You might also think about, though, creating a laundry zone in some other part of the house.

Oh, you know what? There’s an example I wasn’t even gonna share. There are gonna be so many floor plans in this blog post but let me go find another example. I’m gonna pause recording and go hunting through my files briefly while I look for this. Got it all right. So this house is an interesting example because I wanted, I thought of this because of laundry. And in this case, we did, in every example, no. In scheme one, we kept the laundry in the basement, sacrifice necessary for keeping everything else small. In scheme two, we created a dedicated laundry room as we put a small addition off the back and shifted the owner’s bedroom and bathroom into that space, making more room in the center of the house.

And in the third scheme, we actually relocated the laundry into what had been a former pass through bathroom and shifted the bathroom that had been in that footprint elsewhere. But in each case, we were really careful not to locate the laundry. Laundry in the mudroom, and that was for several reasons. One, in this case, the mudroom was very far on the other side of the house. It would have been problematic to get plumbing as far as over to that space. It was actually beyond, not only beyond the kitchen, but then beyond the area of the finished basement and over a crawl space.

So it would have been expensive to move it over there. But also, even though this was a household with, at the moment, a mom who’s primarily doing the laundry and two younger boys who weren’t yet taking charge of their own things, she had an ambition that eventually they would be in charge of their own laundry spaces, and she really wanted to keep it in decent and centralized de-personal zone so that everybody in the household could grow into responsibility for their own laundry. And this was a question that came up on this project.

And we originally her desire had been, I do the laundry, why don’t I make it convenient to me? Let’s just tuck it into our bathroom or closet. And we then identified that actually the way she lives now isn’t the way she’d like to live forever, and we needed to make a different solution in order to provide for that future. The other thing about that particular project that’s interesting and fun is it’s got some specialty qualities to its mudroom, because house with two little boys and then also, actually a dad, all of whom were hockey players, comes with a lot of bulky gear that comes in and out of the house regularly during certain times and seasons.

And so when we were thinking about expanding their spaces and making better transitions between their garage and house, we were specifically thinking about, how can we create a designated area for hockey gear, and how can that designated area for hockey gear not be the space for regular school shoes and coats and backpacks, because there is eventually a smell that’s associated with that type of workout equipment. And so in one solution, we actually even created a separate sort of a mudroom beyond the mudroom that was a zone for the storage and venting of the hockey gear, separate from the regular mudroom, transition to the house.

All of these things are so personal. So asking yourself the right questions, not just about the way you live in your house now, but the way you want to live in your house as you go forward, are really valuable questions to ask. And it was actually after I did this project that I started getting really specific with parents of small kids about where do you do laundry now? But also where would you see yourself doing laundry in an era when you were teaching your kids to be in charge of their own laundry?

So we’ve talked a lot about the qualities, the interior qualities of the mudroom. And in some of these layouts we have actually talked about how to carve out from the existing or add on mudroom spaces beyond the existing footprint of the house. Anytime you’re expanding outside your existing footprint, you’re creating new roof space, new foundation. It is adding an expense, new conditioned area, but sometimes it’s well worth that. So where exactly you’re going to make that transition happen depends a little bit on your budget. How big you want to go your roof line, where it’s going to be convenient to add on extra cover, the configuration of your existing spaces, and like we were just talking about with the hockey family, of your personal life.

But it might be convenient to keep it near the garage, thinking about what you’re bringing in and out, or in some cases, you’re going to be a family that is relatively light on the transition from outside and in, from a Home and Away perspective, but much more interested in storage and processing space, for example, for your garden vegetables. So you might be thinking of a mudroom less as a transition from your outside life and more like a summer kitchen where you’re doing extra processing dirty work. You’re washing dirt off of vegetables. Sometimes that’s a thing that happens outside the house, and sometimes it’s happening in a pantry or an auxiliary kitchen space. So the qualities of what’s going to make a good mudroom for you are always going to be personality specific, lifestyle specific, and to a certain extent, house structure and footprint and layout specific.

But I think if you pop over to the show notes page for this, you’ll be able to scroll through some existing floor plans and 123, solutions for them that will give you a little bit of an idea of what you might try if you get stuck beyond that, I would love to troubleshoot and problem solve your stressful kitchen to garage transition and to create a bedroom that’s really going to work for you. Before I let you go, let’s recap one more time the qualities of a great mudroom. And I really want to emphasize that first one that I mentioned right at the top, standing room for everyone in the house that might be coming and going in one group. This maybe even more than storage and sitting space is hugely important, and it comes down to the issue we’re problem solving for my current on the boards Master Plan client.

Right now they literally don’t have room in their quote, unquote mudroom space to have the parents and both kids exist. Somebody has to be waiting outside of the space to come in. People are taking turns, and this is an inconvenient style of mudroom. It’s, I wouldn’t say it’s worse than nothing, but it’s certainly not functional. So while I don’t believe that everything in your life should be as big as possible. I’m a smaller is better, small is beautiful kind of girl, particularly in the way that I remodel homes, and also in my personal life.

I do believe that you want to make sure you’ve got plenty of standing room in your mud space and thinking again about the specifics of your life. In my personal life, what I have is a dog who is generally very well behaved and calm. Well, I’m gonna say that. Let’s see if anybody knows me calls me out on that.

But when it is time to go for a walk in the afternoon, she is incredibly excited, and she bounces up and down like a kangaroo. And for anyone else, for example, if my folks have come by and we’re all going to take her for a walk around the block, a neighborhood patrol, as she thinks of it, she will be hopping up and down and making it almost impossible for anyone else to be in the space within sort of a three foot radius of the front door. So it’s convenient that there is space further along in my red room and also back in the kitchen, where people can transition in and out of their outdoor gear. Get their hats on, get their shoes on, get their sunglasses gathered.

But for someone who has, you know, no small kids and no active pets, you might need less square footage. For someone who’s got an excitable kid or 10 year old who’s running around in circles while everyone else is trying to get ready to go again. Time will change. Kids will grow up. But you want to think about having enough room for standing room for everyone that’s coming and growing at one time.

And then additionally, you want to have sitting space, maybe not for every single person who’s coming and going at one time to sit, but maybe for two people, at least, not just one chair or one bench, but enough space for people to have multiple butts down while they are putting shoes on and off, getting themselves ready to go. And you want storage space for, at the very least, everything you might need to get in and out of the house in this season, raincoat, light jacket in the summer, heavier and a lighter winter coat in the winter gloves, hats, scarves, boots.

Maybe you want boots, shoes and another pair of shoes for each member of the household. You want these things to have designated places, so they don’t end up all in a pile. And you’re going to think about, where do the keys live? So you’re not always looking for them. Where do again? I think I already mentioned sunglasses, but some of these things that, if you’re me, if you’re slightly ADHD, you’re often doing a lap of the house looking for, okay, where did I leave my headphones? Where did I leave my phone charger? Where did I, you know, sort of picking these things up, identifying a one spot where those things live, and keeping that spot by the front door is a really good idea for people who share that quality, and if you don’t, but your partner or spouse does, then all the more you want to encourage them to invest in missing a designated area for those things.

And then again, the bonus storage items, dog storage items, outdoor cooking storage items, outdoor furniture storage items, maybe laundry. Thinking about all those pieces and where they might fit will help you construct your must have and your wish list for a mudroom that you are improving on or that you are creating almost from scratch as you create the next iteration of your home. That’s about it for today.

Like I said at the top, now really is the perfect time to get started on your master plan. I know I always say every time is the right time to get started on your master plan, and that’s true, just like the right time to plant a tree is today. The next best time was 50 years ago. But there is some magic to wrapping up your summer vibes by gathering and transferring all your excitement about House possibilities, your wish list, your must have list, your dream list, the things you’ve been wondering and discussing and debating about in your household for years to me and to mid my Midwest, then sitting back and letting us generate great ideas, solutions, layouts, floor plans, sketches to share with you as the fall rolls along, so that you can pick between them.

Let us pull them together for you and then turn around and start tapping contractors for work to get started next year. Reach out and schedule a call ASAP. Let’s talk about it for next time. Oh, by the way, you can always find us at midmodmidwest.com and you will find the transcript for this episode and the links to the show notes, the resources, the floor plans, with examples of mudroom solutions that I mentioned extensively in this episode at the show notes page. That’s mid mod midwest.com/ 2202.

Next week, we will be digging into something both existential and philosophical and also very practical, the nature of who your Master Plan is for. What are its uses, aside from to make you feel happy and confident. Who do you share various pieces of it with and why? Like, does the building code officer need to know every detail of your floor plan? Does your contractor even need to see every detail of your master plan? By the way? Floor Plan.

Yes, the building code folks do want to see your floor plan, but they don’t necessarily need every detail of your master plan. It’s not relevant to them. So we’ll be talking about what benefits you get from the Master Plan process, and who is best to share what pieces with next week. Then shortly after that, maybe even the following week, I am having Jim drowsy of ginkgo leaf studio back on the pod to educate us all about mid-century landscaping and what to do with a yard of your mid-century house. I can’t wait for that. So see you all next week.

Pin
Tweet
Share
Pocket
Email