Entryway evolution, part one

Hey all! Hope you're doing well!

Today I'm going to share with you the progress we've made on our entryway. As I mentioned last week, we've been working on it over the last few months, triggered by our decision to move our washer and dryer out of the mudroom and down to the basement.

Moving the washer and dryer left us with a big ol' closet that really wasn't designed for coats and shoes. We made do for a while, though.

And we also had a small coat closet in that space, which was totally redundant (door on the right).

Here's a super-rudimentary mock-up of our entryway. It's not to scale at all, but it'll help you get the gist of the layout.

After a lot of talking and pondering, we decided what we really wanted to do was tear out both the small closet and big closet to make the entryway one open room. Tearing out the small closet was an easy decision. It made the space tight, especially for us coming into the house from the garage. The small closet was on the left when we came in, which not only felt crowded, but also made it tough to open the closet door, since we were literally standing in the way of the door.

Tearing out this closet meant a few things:

• Deciding what to do with the baseboard heat on that wall
• Relocating light switches and getting rid of an outlet
• Leaving gaps in the tile floor where the closet walls used to be

Lucky for me, I have a handy hubs who was able to take care of both the electrical work and the plumbing to cap the baseboard heater (with the help of a friend). The entryway is only 11 ft. by 6 ft,, but had three separate baseboards. So we decided that eliminating one wouldn't cause any trouble.

The tougher decision was to take down the doors of the big closet and open up the space. We could have left the doors and simply installed some closet hardware to make the space useful. But, we decided that instead of a closet with doors, we wanted open storage for coats and shoes. We really pondered this, because without doors, it meant that coats and shoes would be visible to all -- no way to hide a mess!

But, the honest truth was that we never closed those closet doors unless we had people coming over and we needed to hide clutter. 98% of the time the doors were open so we could grab our jackets and go. Was it really worth keeping a closet with doors that would only be closed like 2% of the time? Plus, the space was tight, so when the doors were open they nearly blocked the front door and the doorway into the kitchen. If your shoe happened to be in the way of the closet door, and you needed to open the front door, well, you had to do some shuffling. In other words -- the doors were a pain.

These doors had to go!

So, even though we were nervous that no doors meant we'd have to keep our shoes and coats looking tidy 24-7, we decided to lose them. Not only that, but we decided to lose the door frame and wall that surrounded the closet doors.

The hubs wasn't excited about demoing this wall, since it meant more drywall repair, but I was really adamant that it was necessary to give the room a finished look. So, that wall was going too!

We started demo back in September. Buh-bye, little closet!

Once the wall demo was done, and the electrical and plumbing taken care of, we were left with holes in our tile floor -- since the closet was originally put in, and then the floor tiled around it. We were hoping we could find the same tile and just fill in the gaps, but no luck there -- which meant we had to tear the whole floor out and redo it.

And goodbye big closet and floor!

I'll just pause here and say this whole project has evolved like this -- one thing leads to another, bigger change. The flooring was one (we weren't planning on having to redo the floor), and drywall was another. Tearing out the big closet door wall proved tougher than expected since we discovered it was tied to the main wall by steel plates. He had to do some extra cutting to get everything flush.

The hubs handled the drywall work. He'd never done it before, so was verrry nervous about it -- but it turned out great! And Colby was happy to supervise.

Here's the drywall work done. Even in this state, it was such an amazing difference! This corner is where the small closet used to be.

And the big closet...

Once the drywall was finished, I took over painting the room. The entrway had been painted the same color as the kitchen, but I wanted to do something a little different. I picked a Valspar color called Luna, which looked like a shade lighter than the kitchen.

When it went on the walls, though, it looked pretty similar to the kitchen. That's okay -- it's a nice color!

This is where I'll leave off for now...lots more to share on this room next time!