Laundry Room Makeover - Part 1

Our laundry room is hideous. It's not too bad of a space but it is the Bermuda Triangle of doors! This room is the entrance to the kitchen, basement, and garage. And all three doors open into the laundry room! Its a disaster!! So recently we decided to give this room a makeover!

This corner had a sink and a cabinet - both of which were nice but not really necessary. We are thinking about moving the sink into the garage. While the sink isn't a necessity, it is actually really handy because Clint comes home from work, mowing, and doing who knows what else and he is filthy! He scrubs all his filth off here before coming into the kitchen. Hopefully we can put this in the garage so that he can still use it to get cleaned up without tracking grime all through the house. 

We took the cabinet out but we have other storage plans in mind so we aren't really losing anything here.

The first thing we decided on when planning this makeover was getting rid of one of these doors! Obviously the garage door is important! We also want to keep the basement door for a variety of reasons, but a walking child in the next year is one of the big ones! So the kitchen door is the winner! Clint's first though was to just take it out but the washer and dryer can get kind of noisy so we'd rather have something. So what else can you do? Pocket door! My mom is going to be thrilled! She loves pocket doors! This will automatically give us more space because the kitchen door was the one door that was always open and taking up room!

Once the drywall is ready to be painted, we are going to take these cabinets and the rod of hangers down. We are going to replace them with a homemade shelf with 8 cubby hole openings (2 rows of 4). I am going to buy baskets to fill each cubby. The picture I took doesn't show all the wasted space above and beside the current cabinet. The shelf we are going to make with touch the walls and ceiling to maximize our storage space!We are also going to hang the rod under the shelf so that the rod doesn't sag or rip off the drywall/paint (like the shower rod is currently doing).

(like my exciting video!!)

Sunday Clint worked on the first step: taking off the door, taking off the drywall in the laundry room, installing the pocket door, and hanging new drywall. He needs to finish the casing and then mud and sand the drywall. Then we are going to paint! We are going to use the same color that we painted our extra bathroom. You can see the color here. Then we will lay a new floor! We are thinking a brownish color which would match the baskets I want for the shelves...something like these:

The plan for the corner that had the sink and cabinet is still up in the air. A couple things that we have in mind are:

*a fold-down drying rack like one of these:

*a fold-down shelf/table for folding laundry; kind of like these:

*and finally we are thinking about a small little bench with space underneath for shoes; although we can't decide if we want a corner bench or a straight bench:

One last idea I have is to put a small little shelf between the washer and dryer, but I'm not sure if there is enough room. The washer loves to jiggle around and a small shelf might help it stay put! And it would be easy access to detergent!

I can't wait for this little project to be done! It will be a nice room to first walk into when coming home!

Dining Room Painting

Well we started to paint the dining room (then we will get to the family room since they are connected) and like our other painting projects, it takes us a while. With Clint working nights still, we don't get much done during the week, which is fine. The paint we bought, perfect plum, is pretty thin so it's taking several coats unfortunately. Clint put the chair rail up yesterday since we had company, just so it looks mostly finished. We need to paint the white on the bottom and the trim needs painted as well. The plum needs touched up and the trim needs finished. Hopefully only a couple hours worth of work. Then we will start on the living room, which will be a light gray. 

So far I am pretty happy with the way it looks!

Work!

Now that the warm weather is here (early!), Clint and I decided to get to work! We cleaned all the landscaping in the front yard and the back yard.

We are going to do rock in the front areas. We haven't decided about the back areas yet, if we want to put rock there too or just do mulch.

We opened up the pool cover because we have had temperatures in the 80s the whole week last week and we didn't want any mildew or algae to get out of control. And guess what? The pool already looks fairly good! If the weather keeps up like this, we might open it early May! Woohoo! Now we need to buy some plants and lay the mulch/rock.

We also are getting new sod to lay in Zoe's poop patch because the grass is looking sad.

We also decided to start painting the living room & dining room. We bought a color called perfect plum for the dining room and a light fray for the living room. In the dining room we are putting up a chair rail and painting white on the bottom half. We have the white started and we aren't quite sure if we like the white yet, so we'll see! 

The last thing we are going to start this month is the flooring for the screened in porch. We are going to tear up the nasty carpet and put down ceramic tile. We bought the tile on sale for 66 cents /square foot! Cheap!! 

Hopefully by the end of March we will have all three projects done!