The previous post on “Fixing an old farmhouse” series of posts, was about the kitchen. Adjacent to the kitchen is what I call the cat room. This room serves many purposes now; however, it is the mudroom and where the old refrigerator with the rotten turkey inside was located.

Originally, it was a side/back porch which the previous owners enclosed and converted into a mudroom. I was told that when the former owner (the second owner) became ill and bedridden, the house required an indoor bathroom (it used to have an outhouse – we have no idea where it is). They decided to enclose the porch and use part of the room to build a bathroom. This is the reason why the cat room is shaped like an L. Now this room serves many purposes – first, a room for my cats, where the cat beds, food, toys, litter, and supplies are kept, side entrance, mudroom where we keep coats, rain boots, work boots, hats, cleaning equipment… We moved the water heater to this location; it used to be in the kitchen. The first part adjacent to the kitchen serves as a pantry. It is a generous size room although shaped like an L. It could have served as a dining room as well, but the cats needed their own space too.

I think this room was the most challenging to work with for many reasons besides its shape. It had water damage due to its proximity to the bathroom. It had a pieced-together subfloor that was in very bad shape and had to be replaced. Someone had attempted to reach the bathroom plumbing through this floor, hence the cut out pieces of subflooring. However, this worked out to our advantage because we had to replace the plumbing. All plumbing had to be replaced. It is where the side door is, and it had suffer considerable water damage on the floor, door, and door frame. This room had a natural inclination because it used to be a porch. On those days, many porches where built like that so when it rained water would not accumulate. We had to do many repairs before starting to work with the walls and ceiling. It was the last room we tackled. Here are some pictures of the process, before and after.

The After.

This was not an easy room to work with, and there are a few things we would like to add such as a wooden cabinet for more food/supplies storage, and repositioning of the cat’s beds. Something to do in the future. For now, it is very functional. I hope you enjoyed this post.