The Mud Room Has Become a Deck!

Edited to add: For some reason, I cannot get videos to upload in this post. I left them as images so you can at least see part of what happened. I'll try videos again in another post but we are toying with the idea of a YouTube channel. I'll keep you posted.



You may remember an earlier post I wrote called "The Porch Has Become a Deck". That post was all about tearing down the front porch of our house. Now we have moved to the back of the house and we are tearing down the mud room.

We thought the mud room was an addition that was added onto the house some time after it was built. Our original plan was to use our neighbor's heavy duty fork lift and lift the mud room off of its foundation and move it away. We wanted to attach it to the back of the garage to be used as my classroom while we demolish and build.

Well, after waiting for several weeks, we finally realized that the neighbor's forklift is out of commission and isn't going to be able to help. So we decided to take the room apart by hand and see if we can still use the wood and walls in the new room. 

We started with trying to pull the roof off with the truck:

It turns out that the roof is attached securely to the original roof of the house which is underneath the second roof that was added sometime later. So, we realized we needed to do some loosening and cutting to get it to come off. We put the jack and a 4x4 post under the roof and lifted it off. 

The wood was pretty rotted so it lifted off. The back side of the roof was still securely attached so I climbed up there with a circular saw and cut through the roof to separate it from the house. 

We were able to pull the roof off, but I forgot to tape it. Sigh...

We salvaged most of the 2x4s but the roof itself was not reusable so we cut it up and threw it away.

The mud room has become a sun room! We took a good look at the wood in the walls and the floor. The walls are in decent shape and can be reused, but the floor...not so much. So we decided it would be better to have new wood in the floor of my new classroom. 

The new room is 8 x 16 feet, or 128 square feet. Colorado doesn't require a building permit for anything under 200 square feet. 

We built the floor, insulated it with R-20 insulation, and put on an OSB subfloor. While this was happening, I was removing the 3, yes 3, layers of siding from the mud room to get to the skeleton of the wall. I disconnected it from the side walls and the boys pushed it over onto the ground. 

Then, with a some help from our friends, the Paynes, we moved the wall over to the new floor and attached it. 

We did some more bracing and the wall is standing!

Next, we'll disconnect the side walls and move those over. 

More pix and progress to come!