Well, Mr Rainman and I managed to knock out most of the mud room in the last two weekends. We are at the stage that I dread the most, the last ten percent. It will take an entire weekend just to get that last 10% finished. It cost about $45/sqft in materials to get the three walls, insulation, exterior door, one small window, and three types of interior lining basically just over $4k for a mud room that I installed with help. I cannot imagine building a house in this day and age from the ground up. My suggestion would be to find a house with good bones and do the work yourself.

I decided to go with smooth plywood on the short sides of the room and we just used some scrap tongue and groove to finish off the top. The back wall has all blue pine tongue and groove. I really do like the stuff but at $10/ea for a 1×6”x8’ board it doesn’t take long to add up when covering a wall. I went through about 80% of the wood pile to find 29 pieces that were worth the ten bucks. Unfortunately, the store won’t bring out more material until someone buys all the crud. I had to go to another store and ended up with white pine in two different patterns. Of course we did not realize that the pattern had changed until we were 60% done and there was only 90 minutes left of work. I just told Mr Rainman that we would be the only ones that noticed it because we had uses different patterns on all the walls so no one would be able to tell that we did not deliberately do it that way.

He talked me into doing a white wash treatment on the wood to protect it, transmit the light and let the wood grain show through. I have never done this before so I am interested to see how it turns out. I also have 60 sqft of cedar closet lining. So once I get the walls all whitewashed I am going to install cedar lining on the two plywood walls. This should help us cut down on bugs and moths. The room is on hold this week as I will need to get outside and work on pruning our fruit trees. The weather is screwy and it keeps changing, 20F-60F in Jan-Feb, it’s not normal. So I need to get fruit trees because it might be 70F in March.

We found a contractor to tear off our vinyl siding, replace three windows and install Diamond Kote siding. The siding should outlive us and the weather should not affect it as much as our vinyl siding. The siding does not have to be painted. It’s a crazy amount of money to do that, more than we paid for our first ever house 30 years ago, just for siding. The job is just too big for me to do in a summer while I am holding down a full time job and trying to work on the farm. It is not possible to do all things, some things have to be farmed out.

We are going to have to get another 16’ of ice breaker stops installed on the front roof of the house. We had a fairly large chunk of ice fall and smash into our new porch railing. It shattered one side of the TREX railing. So that is on the list to replace this summer. It’s always something, the gutters have made a huge impact across the front of the house. The ice breakers worked amazing on the side of the house this winter. Even the black plastic moisture barrier we installed under the house is making a huge difference. We have used about 50% less propane to heat the house this winter. At this rate paying for insulation to install under the floors, our investment might be realized in just one winter. If we continue to use this little propane then I want to add insulating under the house to the summer projects list along with installing the gazebo and getting the man cave closed in. Just a few things to knock out this summer along with hay and weeds and mowing.

I have to say that anyone can really learn to do most things by watching YouTube! I had a couple of install questions on the door and window with the house wrap and I was able to find the answers fairly easily. Watch one, do one, teach one!

We are going to leave the concrete floor for a while. I would like to tile it eventually but it is a mud room and we need it for that reason so the concrete is appropriate.