Our New Mud Room

The importance and challenges of living within your means

Side view of home with completed mud room

I’ve been wanting to write about our new mud room since last July when Eric started working on it. But I wanted to wait until it was complete, which it is almost entirely now, a year from start to finish. That seems like a long time to build an 80 sq. ft. extension but not so much when you take into consideration that Eric did it entirely alone and had to pause for winter.

Mud is My Nemisis

If you’ve been reading this newsletter for a while, you know that ever since we moved to our off-grid home in 2020 during the shelter-in-place quarantines, mud has been my nemesis. You can read about it here and here.

The caliche soil of this mesa top holds water like a vessel. It takes hot days of baking in the sun for the mud to finally dry up. Since we don’t get an enormous amount of rainfall, it’s not so much a problem most seasons. Mud season begins in the late winter/early spring when the weather warms up and the snow melts. Every new snowfall is followed…