[The Laundry Room] Wasn't Built In A Day

Let's take a quick look back at the late, not-so-great laundry room of yore:

Above is what it looked like from the third bedroom when we toured the house for the first time.  Dark, scary, and dirty with paneled walls and acoustical tile ceilings.  Let's see if I can dig up a few more photos:

Above: From the kitchen door after the washer and dryer were removed (the former tenant took them when he left).  That's the attic pull-down in the foreground and two weird closet-y things on the background, and that brick is the back of our chimney.

Above: again with the tenant's stuff during our home inspection.  This one was taken from the door leading outside to our breezeway.

I took the above shot after we got our new washer and dryer after a generous assist from my sister and brother-in-law-- without whom we would definitely not have been able to afford pretty white front-loaders-- and after I painted all the paneling white.  I think this was... late September of 2012?

 

 Again with the white paint job, this time the photo was taken from the kitchen door.

I'm not sure if you can tell in any of these photos, but the laundry room ceiling was beginning to sag.  The weight of the pull-down stairs was a bit much for it.  So we needed to shore it up a bit before we could proceed with any renovations, and we also wanted to frame in a space for the half bath we'd eventually like to put in.  The solution was to put a wall up immediately behind the pull-down stairs, thus turning all the space behind it into a potential half-bath (for now it's just a killer closet).  

In order to make room for the bath, we also needed to stack the washer-dryer, which meant removing the "cabinets" that were over them before.  The cabinets were, like all the others in this house, really just open-backed boxes with shelves sitting on ledger boards, and they were covered with old funky peeling shelf-paper.  And some rat poop on the top shelf (I'm guessing it fell down from between the attic floorboard--the acoustical tiles didn't extend into the cabinet, so the top shelf was pretty much open to the attic).  Suffice it to say I wasn't sad to see them go-- you generally don't want something that's been pooped on by rodents that close to your clean clothes.

We needed to move the junction box for the ceiling fixture from the low end of the ceiling (over the washer and dryer) to the high part so the washer and dryer would have enough clearance to stack, and our electrician took care of that for us when he was here addressing the situation in the third bedroom. 

Finally, the laundry machines have to sit about eight inches away from the wall because of the very enormous hookup for the dryer vent, and so the first thing you saw upon entering the laundry room from the kitchen was a whole mess of crap behind the dryer.  Some genius screwed a sheet of plywood against the wall (ostensibly to cover up some wires) and we really didn't have the know-how to address the situation.  Here's a dark photo to explain what I mean:

So in order to hide all of that and also make the laundry room look more like a hallway and less like a laundry room, we built a shallow wall.  We also needed to construct a soffit over the washer and dryer to accommodate some wiring at the ceiling.

While I still have a lot of taping and mudding to do in here, and we still need to hang the new ceiling fixture and put in flooring, and I still have to paint the shiplap behind the laundry machines, I'm just too happy about all the changes to wait til it's done.  I have to show you now.  Here's the view from the third bedroom as of this afternoon (again, please pardon the dark photos-- there are no lights in here yet!):

The future bathroom is behind that curtain-- it'll obviously have a door when it's ready to be a bathroom.

Cabinets are going to be installed to the right of the laundry machines so we'll have lots of storage.

From the kitchen door:

 From the third bedroom proper, through to the kitchen:

It's getting the same hickory engineered flooring as the bedroom.  

tl, dr: same view, July 2012 to September 2013:

,dWGFCKQ;OSDHjabsmvhvamdhkquhKjagdjyBAB.  That's me being excited!