Mudroom/Rear Porch Makeover

For several months, I've wanted to spruce up our mudroom/rear porch. This space has always had a lot of potential: there are large windows on three sides and ample storage on the fourth side. The mudroom connects to our kitchen, and it lets in lovely light. This space is also the primary access to our home, so we see this space several times a day.

But for far too long, our mudroom was a cluttered, disorganized mess. There was so much extra stuff taking up floorspace that we barely had room to maneuver. I'm almost embarrassed to show you these pictures, but it's necessary for the full before and after impact. So here is our dirty laundry. This is the sight that "greeted" us every time we left for work in the morning or returned home:

 

Yikes! Some welcome, right?

And after a weekend of decluttering, organizing, and scrubbing, our mudroom is now a much more functional space.

Window Repair Progress

I am happy to report that we now have one fully-functional, fully-repaired window in the master bedroom. This is cause for celebration! Let's pop a bottle of bubbly...just don't point it towards the newly repaired window, please. If that glass cracks after all this hard work, I will scream.

We started this process approximately two months ago and, in truth, the repair still isn't quite complete on this window. We still need to paint and install new interior stops and then, we'll be done. But I was anxious to write this post. Plus, once the stops are installed, you won't be able to see as much of the window's "guts" as you can see now. For an "in progress" post, I thought it would make sense to have pictures that show more of the window's interior workings. (Here is a diagram with window anatomy, in case it's helpful).

Gothic Revival Chairs (aka "Vampire Furniture")

At the moment, The Papered House is sparsely furnished. In the dining room, we have a small drop-leaf IKEA table (like this one, but cheaper) and several mismatched chairs left over from my college days. Even by college-kid standards, this stuff was cheap. Our "dining set" is functional, but it looks so out of place in our 14' x 20' dining room. It's a room that is meant to have grander furniture than we currently own.

We're furnishing this home slowly, for a few reasons. The first is purely financial. The chimney project is still in progress (more about that next week) and we're also saving towards an oil-to-gas conversion for our heating system. Both of these are pricey, important repairs so we need to make sure we allocate our resources accordingly. Secondly, we're trying to furnish this home primarily with interesting antiques, so we expect that it will take some time for us to find exactly what we're looking for.

But over this weekend, some new dining room chairs made their way into our home. I'm no expert in antique furniture, but I have a hunch that these chairs were crafted in the Gothic Revival style.

These chairs have three prominent arches, lending an ecclesiastical aesthetic. They are quite similar to this pair available from a UK antique seller. But more importantly, these chairs look like they belong in Count Dracula's home, which everyone knows is the true hallmark of the Gothic Revival style. (kidding!)