The Laundry Room Nightmares Are Made Of…

Okay, so maybe my blog post title is just a teeny tiny bit melodramatic. But honestly guys, my laundry room is horrid and in terrible need of a renovation.

To begin with it isn’t even IN my house. I have to trek through my saw-dusty garage to get to a laundry room that is freezing in the winter, muggy in the summer, and has tons of bugs, pests, and dusty in every season because duh, it’s in the garage.

I mean, what a horrible horrible nightmare of a laundry room. Never mind the primary yellow, the cheap fraying office carpet that smells as bad as it looks, the squeaky drawers that have mice living in them and also smell…

 

So this is the perfect space for me to take on for the One Room Challenge (a 6-week design challenge where bloggers make over a space). I have been longing to create a real laundry room. Preferably one that is actually a PART of my house, from the inside.

I hope you will follow along with my misadventures in remodeling my laundry room. I’ll be posting my misadventures every Thursday for the next 6 weeks. Because there are sure to be some “misadventures” when it comes to renovating…some of you know what I’m talking about. Plus I’m going to need your help, encouragement, and advice as I go along.

My Horrible Laundry Room Before

So here is the view looking toward my washer and dryer. On the other side of that far wall behind the washer/dryer is the dining room. Keep that in mind when you see how I re-worked the floor plans.

It’s so hard to reach to take things out of my top loading washer because of the platform. I’m not sure what the intention or reasoning behind the platform was, but it meant things were constantly falling behind the washer and dryer and could never be reached to clean behind. Plus there was SO MUCH space behind the washer and dryer to accommodate the drain pipe and the dryer vent hose, that anything that ended up back there was considered “lost to us forever”. Yes, we are a bit melodramatic.

Then when clothing fell onto any surface, especially the floor, it had to be completely re-washed. Why? Because that floor is nastier than it looks and impossible to clean. We would have to drag the vacuum through the garage to the laundry room, and inevitably I would later find saw dust from the garage in the laundry room AND in our main house after trying to clean this space. No bueno.

I can’t even begin to talk about the storage space at the end of this very long “laundry room”. Because yes, I feel compelled to use air quotes when talking about my laundry room, which doesn’t feel like one to me, so I thought I’d share that here in text format so you would also understand how it makes me feel. Yeah. That.

Oddly, this laundry/storage room at the back of my garage also has two doors to it, so it pretty much means I lose valuable wall space in my garage, but just in case one door doesn’t do the trick, I can access the most hated room of the house via it’s second door. Why thank you.

But hey, I won’t knock the second door, because it is what gave me the brilliant idea to close up the first door, build a wall, and pretty much create a laundry room accessible from the main house. All while retaining that second door as a smaller storage closet for the garage!

The Renovation Begins!

If you haven’t been following my Instastories, you should know that I’m already in the middle of a huge renovation. My kitchen and dining room is getting an incredible makeover (which I will post about soon!), and it just made sense to have the contractor work on both spaces at once. After all, making a doorway opening in the dining room later down the line would have ruined the finished dining room. So pretty much I’m living without a kitchen, dining room, and laundry room all at the same time. Blegh! Definitely not fun.

I say all this to explain that I have already begun work on the laundry room. It is super slow progress because it only gets worked on in spurts here and there while the majority of work is done on the kitchen/dining area. So nope, I didn’t wait for day one of the One Room Challenge to begin…I have been living without a laundry room for almost 6 weeks now.

As a matter of fact, I am currently typing this while sitting in front of a laundromat. I’m sitting in my hot car (because there is a super sketchy looking dude inside who stares at me the whole time…even when I tried staring back. Weird.) waiting on laundry while typing this.

By the way, who knew a laundromat could be SO MUCH MORE EXPENSIVE than just owning your own washer and dryer? Granted, I’m on a well so I don’t pay for water, but with a family of 5, and linens for my Airbnb cottage, I’m spending about $30 a week! *eeep*

So to catch you up, even though the laundry room progress has been like molasses, unlike this picture, it now has a door and walls. But I’m still going to wait until next week to snap a picture of that for you. Partly because I’m out doing laundry and don’t already have a picture to share with you, and partly because this post is supposed to go live tomorrow. Way to procrastinate until the last minute Ursula.

Okay guys, more next week!