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!
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