When you walk into our house from the garage door entrance, there is a mud room immediately to the left. When we first moved in, it was one of the disaster areas we needed to work on. It was more crowded than many common mud rooms due to the huge vanity that was installed in it (not to mention the fact that it was very outdated). It also had a built in shoe rack that was kind of an eye sore-we probably would have left it in if we could have made it look better, but we knew it had to go. We talked about different options of how we could open up the area so it wouldn’t feel so cramped when you went into this mud room. Getting rid of the shoe rack opened up a pretty good amount of space, but it still needed something else to open up the area.
The vanity was taking up the most area so we started looking for a smaller one. With every option we found, we just felt like they would take up more area than we wanted to give up. We also considered just getting a wall-mounted bathroom sink, but I just felt like it would make the room feel like it was a public restroom in a gas station. After these ideas that we had, we decided to look at an option that would take up less space, but would also serve the purposes we needed it to (such as washing wands, brushing teeth, etc.). This option was to buy a pedestal type sink. Not only did it free up a lot of space, it also gave character to the bathroom. There were many styles to choose from and we were able to get a good deal on the entire set up.
Since the plumbing was already in place, all we needed to do was buy some longer supply lines and what would a new sink be without a new faucet to go on it? Once we had installed everything and painted the walls, the mud room looked totally different! When we needed to use the restroom we could actually walk into the bathroom without feeling claustrophobic. Before, each time I went into this mud room I felt like an explorer weaving through a densely vined jungle (without the vastness that the jungle would provide). Another reason that we wanted to update the mud room is because we like to entertain and we knew that this would be the bathroom that our guests would use.
After our home was in a better condition, we started to have friends over. Many of them commented on how much they liked the look of the sink in the bathroom. We have a neighbor who was friends with the previous owners and had been in the bathroom before. The first time she went in there she yelled out to us “I love what you’ve done with this mud room!” and describing it before, she actually used the phrase that it was an “eye sore”. Free up some space in your bathroom and give it some character with a pedestal sink!
