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.

Laundry Room Renovations

Two weekends ago, the clothes dryer finally died.  It came with the house, eight-plus years ago, and I have no idea how old it was before that.  Combined with the washer giving periodic fits, this became the spark for Mary to declare the time had come for the laundry room that she has always wanted.

Instead of the industrial sink, washer, clothes rack, and dryer all next to each other on the wall, her vision was for a stacked washer-dryer pair, and a bench with shoe storage underneath as a place for backpacks to land and shoes to be stored, with cabinets overhead.  After going back and forth about it, we are keeping a sink, but encasing it in a dark brown ("espresso") wood cabinet to match the bench and cabinetry we're installing.  The old linoleum floor has to go, in favor of new broad-format tiles, and the walls will be painted slate blue with white vinyl wainscoting and trim.

Progress has been...halting.  Between the time to engage with the new puppy, go skiing, and handle multiple competing pressures at our respective jobs, it's taken awhile to get started.  We do have some deadlines, though: the new washer and dryer are to be delivered and installed on the 7th of March, so we have to have the floor installed, the dryer vent rerouted, the dryer power outlet moved, and the drywall repaired and painted behind it, before then.  I keep flashing back to the $4,195 dishwasher project from three years ago: what started out as a simple replacement became a major initiative.  This time around we're doing almost all the work ourselves; staggering it properly and getting everything done will be the challenge.  I am learning drywall repair as I go, as well, so we'll see if the finished project is acceptable.  But it will be different, and more modern, and more colorful, and one more piece of the "there's gonna be some changes" aspect of 2013.