It took a long time for us to save the money to renovate it. (15 years to be exact) We first renovated the kitchen and once we did that, the laundry room became even more of an eyesore. It’s right next to the kitchen and even sitting in our family room, you could see right in the laundry room. The thing that irritated me so about the look of the laundry room was a big old hot water heater with a silver pipe that could be seen from the living room. Of course, we could shut the door, but with the entry from the garage passing through the laundry room it wasn’t very practical to keep the door closed. In fact, there were 3 doors that swung IN to this small laundry room. So if the door was closed and someone opened it the moment someone was coming in from the garage, there would be a crash of sorts. I had many years to contemplate what I wanted that laundry room to look like. We even thought about bumping it out into the garage but the wall behind where the washer and dryer are located is a load bearing wall and there is a fuse box that would have had to be relocated. All of that just sounded like more work than we were willing to tackle.
While we were saving up to renovate, I came up with several different ways to disguise the hot water heater. First, I found a screen that covered most of it. Then I found an antique room divider that I put in front of the hot water heater. It helped, but you could still see the metal pipe. Also, there was a weird dropped down ceiling in front of the door that leads to the garage that made the room feel even smaller. We assumed the pipe from the hot water heater fed through there and up to the roof. Would you believe that when we opened it up that there was nothing in there? I’m not sure what the original plan was, but wow (can I insert a huge eyeroll here?). So, what finally triggered us doing this renovation was that our hot water heater broke down. Here was our opportunity to make some changes: would we get a tankless one or a bigger hot water possibly? Maybe we could move it to another location? I was super excited about getting it out of there!
Next up was having a drywall guy come in and fix the ceiling and wall where the mystery pipe should have been. Once the drywall guys were done, they painted. I had a hard time picking the color in that room. As you can see from the pictures, I tried the kitchen color and several other colors: Revere Pewter is the one that I went with. I have to be careful using Revere Pewter in my house. It’s a beautiful neutral color but on the frontside of my house, it pulls green because of the way the sun reflects on the yard and plants. The laundry room and our guest bathroom are both painted Revere Pewter and those rooms are on the back (southside) of the house.
Finally, we were ready to get this washer and dryer hooked back up and this is where the needle scratches across the record........ We had a plan and had researched it, it just wasn’t as easy as you might think. First off, we had to stack the washer and dryer, we had to hook everything up and slide them in as a unit into the very precise cabinet we had built for them.😳 Now, I’m going to stop here and say that my husband is a mechanical genius. He can figure out how to do the most difficult tasks I come up with. And, this one was a doozy. We didn’t have much space to work in. We had a dryer hose with a magnetic connector. The magnetic connector was such a great idea in theory but those magnets would not line up perfectly so when we turned the dryer on, lint went everywhere. We ended up using a telescope type of venting to connect to the hose so the dryer could go very close to the wall without kinking the hose.
We decided we wanted an antique door to do this job. We needed something with richness and character that would be pretty from the kitchen side and the laundry room side. I shopped at many places between here and Tennessee and found a few options, but they were so pricey. We needed a bargain. So on one of our weekly trips to the laundromat, we decided to pull in a local place that we pass all the time called Flealand. It’s a weekend flea market but they have one side that is open all week that has booths similar to a thrift store, but it has more of an antique/vintage vibe. We shopped the whole place and got to the very last booth and what did that booth have? You guessed it, a whole slew of doors! We kind of dug through them and found one we liked, and you’ll never guess how much it was?! $75! Now as great as that sounds, let me tell you, it needed some WORK! And Doug loves to strip furniture and unearth something gorgeous, so he started working on it right away.
Now, check out the before and after of this door!
We also keep Coconut’s litter box in there so being able to eliminate the third door has made it so much better.
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