In my 17 Things For 2017 post the very first item on my list is to finish projects around the house, specifically the laundry room. Silly me, I thought this project would be done within 2-3 weekends worth of work. It’s now been two months and I’m crying without my washer and dryer. We have made a decent amount of progress, though, and I’m excited to share it with you.
Our laundry room is not actually a real “room”. It is open to the rest of the basement – no doors, no walls. It does have two creepy closets, though! We’ll get to those in a minute. The laundry room is located at the bottom of the basement stairs and is a tiny area where I spend as little time as possible. I get crammed between my washer/dryer and the folding table. It’s about two feet of space that just isn’t functional. There is nowhere to put a drying rack unless I box myself in and climb over the folding table to get out. Here is a floor plan so you can get a better idea of what I’m talking about (this might even make it look more spacious than it really is).
One day, Shane and I started thinking of how we could make this space more functional. Should we make it a half bath and put up a wall and door? Should we move the washer/dryer to the closet area? In the end, there were way to many unknowns and expensive fixes to do anything fancy. It’s just a laundry room that I wanted a little more space to move around in and we were on a budget. We decided to open up the closets and put in open shelving, remove the folding table (which became Shane’s worktable in the garage), and change the ugly flooring. Here is a picture of the two closets at the bottom of the basement stairs and the utility sink.
I had all amazing ideas for redoing the folding table and making it beautiful but it ended up in the garage and who needs a gorgeous workbench? Not Shane 🙂 Here is a picture of the laundry room taken from the bottom of the stairs looking at the washer/dryer, folding table and cabinets. The door leads out to the garage.
This is another view of the entire “room” taken from the other side of the basement.
The closets were small and I really just threw stuff in there that I never wanted to see again. It was definitely not a functional space.
There was also a weird, creepy door in the middle of the staircase that led to nowhere. The five year old in me wanted to climb through the door and slide down the pipe on the other side, but let’s face it, I’m not five and the door is really only like three feet off the ground!
Then there were these god-awful cabinets that Shane and I constantly banged our heads on once the folding table was removed. They needed to go!
I’d say this project has been half DIY and half professionally done. Shane and I were able to demo most of the work on our own and let me tell you… it felt good! I started by removing the tile floor. Most of it came up pretty easy but to my surprise there were two layers of tile before getting to the cement floor. Layer 1 was the ugly vomit-looking tile in all of my before pictures and layer 2 was a green and yellow 50’s style tile that no one would ever use today (I hope).
Next, we Shane started taking down the walls to the closets (I took a few swings with the sledgehammer!). We found a lot of pipes and ducts that would eventually be half hidden and half displayed. Unfortunately, we couldn’t start moving all of these around and changing things up. That would be way out of our budget and like I said, it’s just a laundry room. I’m okay with a few pipes here and there.
The weirdest part about taking the walls down was what we found in the walls. I really wonder what the people were thinking and doing when they built this house! A lot of it just didn’t make sense. Like this pair of underwear…
How disgusting! There were also bags, cloths, and bones (yes, bones, probably from an animal or leftover lunch?). The laundry room was a mess after demo but immediately the space looked so much larger. I even discovered a small cubby area that I decided to use for extra storage.
We were finally ready to bring in the pros. They framed some of the pipes in, put up drywall and made the room look somewhat decent again.
We still have lots to do and oh how I miss my washer/dryer! I never thought I would miss doing laundry so much. My basement looks like a bomb exploded on the other side (I’ll save you the torture of seeing that). This is what is left on our list:
- Paint walls
- Tile floor
- Add trim
- Hang shelves for storage
- Remove cabinets (we have permanent headaches from banging into them)
- Clean sink
I hope to have another update for you soon, but, ya know, this is the never ending project!
