Hello, hello! How was your weekend? We hauled off some scrap metal from Garan’s parents’ house Saturday, and we had a great day at church yesterday. The weather has been absolutely gorgeous!
Anyway, welcome back to the house tour!
Our laundry room is tiny (5′ x 6′), and we have 2 doors into the room: one from the garage, and the other from the foyer/living room. The one from the living room opens into the laundry room and covers the washer. To make it even more awkward, the light switch is also back there. I have to do quite the dance to get in there with a full laundry basket! Because of the dryer duct, we have to keep the dryer 1 foot out from the wall, but door frame won’t allow us to pull the washing machine out to match.
Garan has an electrician friend who says it won’t be a problem to move the light switch to the living room side, so we may do just that at some point. I’m working on a shelf to cover the area behind the dryer and I hope to finish it in a couple of days.
And then there is the door situation. We’ve thought about just removing it and hanging a curtain, but I often run a load of clothes while Garan is watching tv, and that could get annoying fast. We also thought about hanging a barn door on a track system or making a pocket door, but we finally realized that making the door swing out into the living room would be the simplest solution. We’ll probably revisit the other options at some point, though!
When we bought the house, the shelves above the washer and dryer were a wire-and-zip-tied hot mess.
Using it as a miniature garage while we painted the living room didn’t help its looks any… =) Yikes!
Nothing was screwed into a stud, there were holes everywhere, and the shelves weren’t anything close to sturdy, so we ended up putting things on the washer and dryer instead. After a few weeks, I took the bottom shelf and the backing piece down, and Garan added a bar for hanging clothes:
You can see the weird L shape they had going on. It was just zip ties holding the bottom shelf up on the back side!
It brightened things up a lot, but the clothes still brushed the wire rack and didn’t hang straight. I got tired of it and pulled the rest of the shelf down a few nights ago. =)
As you can see, I’m in the process of filling all the holes. The people who lived here before us had a crazy way of hanging things:
I am not even kidding. The sad thing is, they never hit the stud. They just gave up and put the shelving up anyway. *sigh*
Time for the list! Here’s what we’ve accomplished so far:
- Replaced the dryer duct (it was really crooked and plugged up in the attic…we prefer to not start fires with our clothes)
- Pulled down the crazy shelves
- Added clothes bar
- Put up hooks for the ironing board
And the to-do list:
- Paint. I can’t stand the yellowy beige.
- Put a shelf behind the dryer
- Hang a cabinet for closed storage above the washer
- Rework the door situation
- Move the light switch to the living room wall
- Replace the flooring?
I’d like to pretty it up a bit. You know, like the ones in blogland and on HGTV that have fresh flowers and chocolates and a tv? Just kidding. They always say that stuff makes laundry so much easier, but I think a maid would do just fine… =D
xo, Amanda Marie
xo amandamarie 
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