Laundry Beginnings

So if you had an entire house that needed renovating, which room would you do first?

I decided that I had to have a laundry room first.  Like I said in the last post, how could we expect to get any work done if we didn't have clean undies?

Also, the laundry room needed the most work, as it has had the most water damage, so we figured we might as well start this thing off with a bang!

Here are the before shots:

This was after we'd already gotten into the demo- there was a weird little closet wasting space and surrounding the leaky and non functional hot water heater.

But the worst of it was the floor.  It was just... soggy.  We had to tear out the entire subfloor and replace it.

Luckily, none of the floor joists had been damaged.  Unluckily, someone had apparently replaced the subfloor in here before, but instead of removing the rotten subfloor, they just chopped it up and threw it in the crawlspace... yuck!  So we spent an entire day removing moldy debris, bucket by bucket, out of the crawl space so that poor HoneyDo could work down there...

Look at that brave face!

We blocked all the joists in this room just as a precaution, then laid down the OSB subfloor.  We also replaced the damaged drywall with greenboard:

HoneyDo replaced the back door and designed the door casing to give the room more of a craftsman style using various pieces of wood and moulding.  We'll use this as a pattern for the rest of the house as well.  Here you can also see the installed dryer (the washer's next to it) and one of the two storage cabinets we put in.  The storage cabinet is actually an unfinished oak pantry that we repurposed for the room.

  

Then, I got to work painting the room.  We used Olympic One (paint and primer- a life saver!) in Amaretto:

And voila!  We've got a functioning Laundry Room!

Next I'll show you the ceiling and the floor, (I heart both of them) and the fun projects that went into this room!