The Laundry Room, Part 3

Mid-week last week, Ken told me he thought we could pick up a couple more upper cabinets for the laundry room. So on Friday, I asked about his plan for the weekend. He said that a check we'd been expecting had arrived so if I wanted to deposit it, I could go buy all four of the cabinets to finish out that part of the project. Whee! The catch was he expected me to put them together while he went over to meet with a potential renter of the Money Pit on Saturday.

Deal!

I did some housework on Saturday morning and then went to Home Depot to buy my cabinets. Saturday afternoon I watched a "Hawaii Life" marathon on HGTV while assembling cabinets. As I finished them, I put them in the laundry room, just waiting for us to mount them on the wall Sunday.

Installation required a few colorful words, a head banging into a cabinet, and moving the washer and dryer again. But when all was said and done, I was dancing around doing my happy dance. Well, in my head anyway.

 

Above the washer and dryer -- and notice the nice white water hookup box!

 

A line of white storage -- and Soleil says hello.

 

 

After taking these pictures, I went to Home Depot one more time.... to pick up caulk and a spacer for the end of the row of cabinets. I love Home Depot! After picking up what I needed, I planted myself in a main aisle for a minute until a young male employee came along and asked if I needed help. I asked if he could rip the spacer down from 3 inches to 2.5. He looked at it and said that their saw wasn't all that good at narrow things -- that they were not supposed to use it for materials less than a foot wide. But.... he'd give it a try. He carefully measured my spacer -- not just twice, but three times -- and placed it in the saw. He then got a wider scrap of wood to put in with it to help secure it in place. Mere minutes later I have a beautifully smooth cut on my spacer. I took it home and glued it in place.

 

Next up is installing the laundry since and cabinet. It should arrive this week and we'll install it on Saturday. Then, I'll caulk everything and we'll be done.... until I find something else to do in there. :-)

 

In the meantime, I did add a couple of fun things. First I replaced the oak and brass hooks with these:

 

And I also put up a sign -- fair warning to the Budget Director and any visitors:

To be fair, Ken does a lot of the laundry. The sign might be more aimed at me!

I am still organizing in the cabinets. The one directly above the sink is for all my cat grooming supplies. Yes, it takes an entire cabinet for that. Poor show cats! The ones above the washer and dryer have laundry supplies, along with some other rarely used things on the upper shelves. Those shelves are hard for me to reach -- a step stool is necessary -- so they are good for those things I can't part with, but might need later. Or might throw away the next time I go on a serious clean and purge binge. Other stuff is put away, pending me rearranging again and again and again....One cabinet is still empty, but I doubt that will last much longer.

So... from 80s ugly and very little storage to bright, beautiful and organized! What a change, don't you think?

The Laundry Room, Part 2

A quick recap... Last June we started a redo of our laundry room. Here is what it looked like when we moved in:

 

The Original Laundry Room - Bleh!

 

We replaced the flooring as soon as we bought the house. No more daisies! You'll have to go read the old blog for the full story of part 1 -- moving the Beast and replacing it with cabinets and shelves. But let me just say, I've been waiting and waiting for the Budget Director at our house to say the funds were available to complete the transformation. A couple weeks ago he told me that it was time and I danced around excitedly.

 

Here's the mess I had before we started work weekend before last:

 

 

Messy, messy shelves!

 

Functional but far from pretty. Not to mention that the upper cabinet and the base cabinet do not match. Okay, so they don't have to match to store things, but well... I'm like that. I like things to match! Also, the laminate was coming up on the countertop. And the open shelves were just an invitation for the cats to climb up there for naps, knock stuff down, or worse. What could be worse, you might ask? Please, don't go there!  

 

Off to Home Depot we went to buy the cabinets on a Friday after work. We picked up two base cabinets, two upper cabinets, a countertop, and a tall storage cabinet. We also ordered a laundry sink in a cabinet. It's not going to match perfectly, but I guess I'll live.... The rest of the wall cabinets had to wait.

 

But before we could start installing them, first I had to clean all that crap useful stuff off the shelves, move the washer and dryer out from the wall, and do some painting. The box where the water lines for the washer attach was in scary condition -- rusty and dirty. I cleaned it then scrubbed it with steel wool. Once it was as clean as I could get it, I sprayed it with Rustoleum paint & primer in white. Five coats later the rust was all hidden and the box looked all white and clean. Yay! I painted the rest of the room Behr Sapphireberry, although I left all the holes from the shelf standards unfilled. We would use them to know where the studs were when mounting the cabinets.

 

 

Painted & ready to put back together.

 

Sunday morning dawned and Ken went to work hooking up the dryer and the washer. Hooking up the dryer vent is a whole 'nother story and I don't want to think about it. Let's just say it's another mystery of how this house was built that has now been fixed.  Ken brought in the boxes containing the cabinets so we could put them together. The day before his drill had died (sigh...) so we started work on the tall cabinet using just our regular human-powered screwdrivers.

 

 

Big cabinet -- when we decided power screwdrivers were necessary.

 

That didn't last long and off to Home Depot again for a new drill and a couple of power screwdrivers. Then back to work. The cabinets go together fairly quickly and have good instructions with pictures. A square, a screwdriver, a drill, a hammer, and some glue are all the tools needed and for the most part, one person can put them together. Hanging the wall cabinets is MUCH easier with two people, but the others could be completely assembled and installed by anyone who can read directions and run a drill.

 

 

Tall cabinet in place.

 

Shelves in the tall cabinet.

 

To make better use of the tall cabinet, I will buy a couple more shelves. Two of the three in there move and we just don't have that many tall things we need to store here. And, I might add, the cabinet is only six foot tall, so I can either put something on top to store more stuff (I'm thinking cubbies, but I haven't decided) or I can pile things up there if I need to.

 

Once that was done, time for the first base. While doing the uppers is easier when there is no base in place, I wanted to make sure we had the right spacing between the top of the base and the bottom of the upper. Standard is 18 inches, so that's what we went with.

 

Once one base was in place, it was time to build and mount the first upper. Of course, nothing ever goes quite as planned and we confirmed what we had suspected -- the studs on this wall were 24 inches apart rather than the usual 16. This is an exterior wall and the house has 2x6 framing rather than 2x4. I guess they decided they didn't need as many.... On the plus side, the house is very well insulated! The spacing of the studs presented a problem, however. The cabinets are 24 inches wide, so only half of the screws would go into studs. Not good if we were planning to put anything heavy in the cabinets. So once again Ken headed to Home Depot - this time to buy wall anchors.

 

With anchors in hand we went back to work. Then the batteries on the new tools were dead and we decided we'd done enough work for the day -- what with running to Home Depot twice and building three and a half cabinets. (I'd done most of the next upper while Ken was at HD.) Oh -- and the wrestling with the dryer vent!

 

 

Waiting for batteries to charge.

 

Monday I was sick, so Tuesday evening we came home from work and finished up. Batteries all charged, humans motivated, in no time at all we had finished up the second part of the laundry room redo. 

 

Part 2 complete -- looking from the dining room into the laundry room.

 

Part 2 complete - looking from the laundry room back toward the dining room.

 

 

Pretty, right? And such an improvement! I'd go in there and just smile. And it wasn't even all done yet!

 

My next post will cover Part 3... in which the Budget Director surprises me by saying I can buy all four of the remaining upper cabinets and I put them all together by myself to get out of visiting the Money Pit. Later! 



 

Here We Go Again...

Yes, I'm giving blogging another chance. I started one, but then I didn't post for awhile. And then I forgot my password -- and the email address I used to create the blog. Um.... Yeah. I'm a little bit infamous for my inability to remember things like passwords I don't use every day. And don't get me started on the idea of a password vault. After creating three of them -- and forgetting the passwords to all three -- I've conceded that I'm doomed to failure in that department. Which is really sad considering I work in information systems security!

So.... uh.... let's just get that old blog site listed here in case you want to see what I did before. Nothing earth shaking or terrbily exciting, so don't get your hopes up. Here it is: http://lisalostinthewoods.blogspot.com

To save you and me time, I'm going to cheat and copy my intro post from there to this blog. Then I can just get on to blogging -- like I never lost my password. And since this is linked to my main email address, there's a better than average chance I'll be able to recover my password if I forget again.

Here we go....

Welcome to my new blog. Fair warning: I'm not sure how much I'm going to post here. I always start out with great intentions, but then I get busy or distracted or idea-less and don't post for awhile. Still, I've been thinking for ages that I wanted to place to just write and share.

So... the laughter, inspiration, storms, and adventures tag... the first letter of each word spells out "lisa". Kinda of silly, but what do you expect? Don't look for brilliance here.

Laughter is self-explanatory. Quite often I write funny stuff. Oh, I'm not The Bloggess. If you came here looking for that level of insanity and humor, I'm not it! But I do think a good lot of life is funny -- or at least I can find something to laugh about or mock (yeah, it's a weakness, what can I say?) in nearly everything. I speak fluent sarcasm and it may be used from time to time. Beware.

Inspiration is again pretty obvious, I think. It might be something that inspires me. Or maybe I'll be trying to inspire others with a DIY project, a new recipe, my latest choice of paint for the kitchen, some thoughts about the world. Or maybe just a really cute pair of shoes. Oh wait -- there's Pinterest for that! (You could just follow me there.)

Took me awhile to come up with a word for the S. Silliness? Covered by laughter. Social? Um... not very specific. Social? As in Social networking? Social services? Social interaction? Just being friendly social? Strike that one. Hmmm.... nouns starting with S.... Sandwiches? Scissors? Soffets? Shoes? Sunlight? You can begin to see how my wandering mind works. As in, not very well when pressured to come up with something clever.

Storms came up as a tag to describe both the problems in life as well as the storms of thought I have. And perhaps the storms of words (aka rants) I think/write about issues. I could have called it "Soliloquies" but then you'd have just thought I was being pretentious by using big words! :-) (which then begs the question, "can one appear pretentious when using emoticons?") So Storms, it is! Oh, and I do have an evil twin -- ask Ken -- but I don't let her post. So we should all be safe from her rantings and rage.

Adventures. You're probably thinking this is applies to travel. And you'd be right. Sometimes. While both Ken and I want to travel all over the world, our trips tend to be less far afield than that for now. And one can have plenty of adventures just getting to work each day. So you could hear about my adventures trying to find the a restractable clothesline for the laundry room or pots for the deck or my distress about the crazy and clueless drivers out there on the road.

One thing you won't find much about here is the cats. I can't say I'll never talk about them. They are a big part of our lives and it seems like a lot of our projects deal with them one way or another. But I'll continue to post my cat stories and pictures over on the LostWoods blog.

This isn't a decorating blog. It's not a cooking blog. It's not a political blog. It's not a parenting blog. It's all that and more and less. It's just a blog about life in my world. Me, lost in the woods.