Although my house will still be tiny by most measures, I’m adding some more square footage this fall. As much as I like the idea of a tiny house, when you are homesteading—growing your own food, preserving it, making most of your food from scratch—you inevitably are going to need a little more space. Enough of my current house is packed with food and drink storage, canned and fresh, that I don’t have enough room for storing my cheese and winemaking equipment and the fridge and freezer I use to store homegrown produce. I’m not complaining, but it would be nice to have a place to store the excess clutter in my house so that it’s a more livable space. That’s why I’m building this mudroom. My garden shed is also cluttered with all sorts of homesteading equipment and I need an overflow.
Since it’s unheated, the mudroom won’t add to the energy consumption of my house in winter, and it may even reduce it to some degree. The addition will also serve as an thermal envelope and shield the inside of the house from the winter winds, since the current door opens up to northern winds and the new door will open to the east.
This mudroom isn’t a great example of natural building—it’s pretty conventionally built. But it is still a green addition, being built of all reclaimed lumber, dimensional lumber from demolished buildings and pallet wood. The windows were also seconds and slightly damaged returns.