Laundry Room Dreams

I bet if you ask anyone about the one room in their house that is just never big enough, they will tell you it's their laundry room.  If you're like me, you don't JUST do laundry in your laundry room.  Most of the time, I take all the clothes in there and throw them all over the floor to sort them.  I also keep all of my cleaners up on a shelf in there to keep them far away from little hands.  All the brooms, mops, iron and ironing board are in there too.  All the pet supplies is also in there.  Also, it seems like a lot of our junk ends up in there.  Ya know, the stuff there is never a place for.

When we started renovating, I knew I wanted to maximize the laundry room space the best I could.  Do you remember our original laundry room?

The first thing we did was take the bifold doors off and tear down the walls!  The guys also knocked out all of those wimpy shelves!  And sadly, yes, the pencil sharpener had to go.  I wanted bead board on the walls in here.  (Shock!)  So, the walls had to be fixed and smoothed out.  We also had to figure out a way to frame in a pantry, since we took down the kitchen wall that originally held the pantry.  I have always dreamed of having a mud room, or at least a small tiled area where we can come in with wet feet or muddy boots.  I love those cute little benches with the baskets underneath!  We also have an old extra fridge that we kept around during the renovations, and it ended up in the laundry room as well.  We had a lot of stuff and a lot of needs for our laundry room.  But would we be able to pull it off??

The original laundry room was closed off, and had those bifold doors so you could shut it off.  There was a small hallway that ran beside it to the back deck door.  We thought it would feel a lot more spacious if we just made it all one big room.  I couldn't have a separate mud room, so I settled for a mud room/laundry combo.  Our back deck door is in the laundry room, so that is where we come in if we are dirty.  Ya know, from all that yard work we've been doing....riiiiiight.

I realized last night that from these blog posts, these projects seem to have happened relatively quickly and easily.  Um...not the case folks!!  There were so many steps to get to each new step, it's just impossible to explain it all in words!  There were tons of projects along the way that I haven't mentioned yet.  Like the ceilings.  Every single room in the house had popcorn ceilings.  We realllly didn't want popcorn, so that meant it all had to be scraped off.  Anyone out there ever scraped ceilings??  NOT a fun job.  Now, I'll go ahead and say, luckily I am very short and we have tall ceilings....so my services were not needed in this particular project. :)  However, Ben and his friends spent probably 3 good weeks (at least) coming up to the house every night AFTER they had worked at their normal jobs every day.  They had spray bottles that they used to spray water on the popcorn to soften it, and then climbed up on ladders and used putty knives and scrapers to scrap it all off.  Then you have to use sand paper to sand everything super smooth.  This creates unimaginable amounts of dust.  Then you have to go back and sweep up all the mess and dust.  It's an awful job, and they did every room in the house.  Makes for sore arms peeps!   After it was all cleaned up and dust free, my dad primed and painted every single ceiling for us.  Ever stand on a ladder with your arms over your head while looking up at the ceiling painting and trying to stay balanced?  Easier said than done!  The ceilings are just an example of a project that seems very small and boring, but makes a GINORMOUS difference in the finished look of a room!!  I love my smooth ceilings and I'm grateful to the men in my life that spent a month of their lives making it happen!  All to appease little ol' me!   Here's the laundry room with everything smooth and some of the new trim added.

Then dad got busy on my bead board!  We kept it high again so we could see it behind the washer and dryer.

Next on the list was the floor!  Dad put down backer board and I picked the tile! Sounds fair right??  I FELL IN LOVE with this tile from Lowes!!  It's my favorite floor in the whole house!  It has all different shades of blues and grays, and looks awesome coming off of my granite!!

Dad and I worked side by side laying this tile.  It was actually fun!!  It was a gorgeous spring day, the doors and windows were open, and the radio was blastin!  It's days like these that I will remember when I'm old and gray and walk across those tiles.  The memories of working with my dad in my dream house will stay with me forever and ever!

This next picture shows the new framing for the pantry.  It looks small here, but actually turned out to be pretty huge once the shelves were in!  I love it!!

We finished the tile just a couple of weeks before we moved in, so this is basically how the room looked on move in day.  I think I mentioned that we moved in on May 19th, and it was our anniversary.  If we had a choice in the matter, we would have liked to have more done in the house before moving our little family of 3 into it!  But, we were just so thankful our other house sold and they wanted to close and move in...so that meant we had to be OUT!  Here I am in my new laundry room the night we moved in! Do I look a little excited??  :)

I'll post the finished laundry room pictures soon!  Stay tuned!