Laundry Room Reveal.

(If you're rushed, just scroll to the bottom for pics!)

I am blessed to have a large room for doing my laundry. It is in the basement and it takes up a full quarter of the main floor above. That makes it sound much larger than it is: I have a small house! The room is actually more like 12' x 15'. The freezer and pantry are here too.

We have been working on the room for a month.

We took down the old wall board and found the insulation was falling off the wall.

The actual work didn't take that long: but we had two crises which we had to deal with down there.

The first involved the bath tub. It stopped draining. My husband determined that the last piece of cast iron pipe needed to come out and be replaced with plastic. He did that. It took almost a full evening to saw through that cast iron, though!

The second problem involved the washing machine. I know this is going to sound bizarre, but I let the machine flood the floor several times without telling my husband we had a problem. Yes, even after we put up the new wallboard.

It occurred to me --after the wall board suffered a bit of damage-- that normal people don't curse and walk through or around water all over their laundry room floors to sort, wash, dry and fold the laundry. For days. But it wasn't until the washing machine wouldn't go through the wash cycle properly that I sat down with my best friend Google and tried to figure out what was wrong.

After we replaced the water sensor control switch (a $30.00 part!), my husband decided to cut a half inch off the bottom of the wallboard and prime and paint it again. That took days, too.

Meanwhile, I found a new solution for the extra bed-linens. I prettified my folding table/donation station.

And, I kept decluttering. I went through things and let things go. We made two trips to the dump during this--and loaded up the Jeep for a third. I filled the Jeep up with donations. True, a lot came from other parts of the house, but somehow my beautiful, bright new laundry room inspired a Big Purge.

So, are you ready?

Here we are.

Come down the stairs and turn to your left. This is what you used to see:

and this is cleaned up!

Now, I see this:

That newly trimmed window faces East. It's pretty down there in the morning right now.

And yes, I painted the rafters, thank you very much.

Here's what it used to look like as I approached the laundry "area."

All that stuff there made it kind of hard to pull out those plastic rolling laundry sorters!

Here's the view, now:

I found these wire shelves outside in the playhouse. When winter comes, these boots will move upstairs and I'll put the "summer sports" things here. At least, that's the plan.

The new hampers are under the table by the machines. Hopefully, we'll insulate and put up new bead board paneling on this wall next month!


I still need to hang a few hooks and figure out what I'm going to do about my clothes line, but for now, I'm finding excuses to do laundry!