Mudroom

Posted by Todd on May 15, 2002

In Reply to: Mudroom posted by Debbie on May 06, 2002

: : : : : : : There seem to be a number of Americans contributing to this forum (I'm English). I wonder if one of you helpful people can tell me if the word "mudroom" is a normal American word, and what it means.

: I never heard this word until we moved from Florida to Chicago. And it's not in my Webster's II new College Dictionary.

First, see what everybody else said. You take off your muddy boots, etc., in the mudroom. Synonyms might be ante-room or foyer or whatever.

Second, I think you'll find mudrooms in the Northern U.S. (Chicago, rather than Florida). Here's why: If the outside temperature is 20 below zero, opening a door rapidly sucks heat out of your house. It's better to have a small room in between the outside door and the main living room. Sort of like an airlock on a space ship. In extremely cold weather, the heat gets sucked out of the small room, but not the whole house. You shut the main door, brush off the snow, take off your boots and scarf and hat and mittens and coat, hang them up, and then you go through the secondary door into the house. In cold weather, you always kept the second door closed. And the mudroom was always about 10-15 degrees colder than the main room.