Our New Laundry Room

When we last left our story, we had two things: a dryer failure, and consequently, the excuse we'd been waiting for to get a new laundry room.

The previous laundry room had been what the builders had installed, and it was unwieldy (and always a bit of a mess):

Side-by-side appliances, no place for the kids to drop backpacks, overhead cabinets that were clunky and beige walls with 1988 lineoleum floors...all just begging to be tossed out.

We pulled out the old appliances and the old laundry sink (which had no underneath storage to speak of), tore up the old lineoleum floor (both satisfying and frustrating), pulled down the old cabinets, and left a shell of a room.

Putting it back together, we put in the new floor, arranged for the dryer power and vent duct to be moved (which also surfaced the fact that the duct hadn't really been connected anymore--now that's fixed), painted a new color of slate blue, and added wainscoting and trim (she had always wanted wainscoting somewhere in the house).  New cabinets and the bench went in.  Here's how it came out:

We did everything ourselves but for the connecting of the appliances, the rerouting of the duct and power, and the connecting of the new sink.

In the end, it cost us about $3,350 for the new laundry room (fully half that is the appliances), plus whatever hours we spent scraping up linoleum glue and putting up the new walls.  We even had a chance to learn more about drywall repair in the process.  Is it worth it? Sure: we finally have a room Mary is happy with, that works well, and that we can be proud of.  I'd call that a good investment.