Today marks the beginning of the Spring 2019 One Room Challenge and I couldn’t be more excited to jump into this one head first! It seems like only yesterday I was wrapping up my Fall 2018 ORC project, which was comparatively tame to what I have planned this time around. That being said, I’ve roped my wonderful husband Derek into helping me out for this one. Gotta love that guy for putting up with me and my projects! You’re thinking yeah, yeah … get on with it already! So here we go!
As many of you know, my husband and I bought our home about four years ago and we’ve been slowly remodeling it ever since. And by remodel I mean basically rebuilding the inside: reconfiguring some of the rooms, tearing down walls, and adding some as well. In fact, the master bathroom that I remodeled for the Fall ORC used to be a walk-through laundry room and half bath that housed the door to the backyard. Oh, how I wish I had pictures of it! Our living area, which is now open concept, was two little rooms. The one just inside the front door was the living room and the other one was part of the kitchen. It included a fireplace, the sliding doors to the back porch, and also a door to the laundry room, which was just to the left of where our TV is now. Again, I wish I had pics.
One of the things we did first when we bought the house was close off that door between the kitchen and laundry. We then closed off the exterior door and removed the wall and door that separated the laundry and half bath. Since the half bath was connected by yet another door to the master bedroom, it made it really easy to convert it into a master bath. The question was what to do with the laundry.
Since the house didn’t have forced heat or AC we also needed a place for that, so it just made sense to create a laundry room with a closet to house the water softener, water heater, and new furnace. So my husband built a room for all those things inside the garage, with plans to convert the rest of it into living space eventually. After living with it for three years, I’ve realized the situation is less than ideal. Since the room is in the garage and we’re always working on projects out there, it’s always filthy. And, as one might imagine, cleaning your clothes in a room where there’s no heat during the winter and dust all over everything doesn’t exactly provide any motivation to do an already dreaded task. Having the little ones escape out into our cluttered, dirty garage every time I try to get a load of clothes out of the dryer also adds to my annoyance with our laundry sitch.
So, we’ve decided to convert half of the garage to make the laundry room part of the house for the ORC! You guys, I am SO EXCITED! As you can see from the aerial plan above, we’re going to remove the door in the dining room that leads to the garage and turn it into the opening of a hallway that will have an opening into the laundry room on one side and a door leading into a much-needed storage closet on the other. There will be an exterior door leading into what remains of the garage at the end of the hall for now, until we convert the rest of it sometime (hopefully) in the next two years.
When we originally planned out the laundry room, we made the length six inches too small to allow for the washer and dryer to sit side-by-side. We were going to tear down the wall and expand it so we could do so, but decided having a sink would be WAY more useful, especially with little ones getting messy outside and chickens who still need fresh water in the winter when the exterior spigot is frozen. And poop covered eggs that need cleaning, for that matter!
That being said, this week we plan to tear down that wall and remove the tile at the edge. The garage is on a cement slab and so we’ll have to extend the subfloor my husband built for the laundry room to make it level for the hallway and storage closet. If we get the wall down, the tile out (so we can blend it with the new tile that will have to be laid), and the subfloor extended this week, that’ll be a huge accomplishment in and of itself! Wish us luck!
I’d also like to briefly mention my gracious sponsors for the project: Eclectic Goods, Fireclay Tile, Kingston Brass, Mitzi by Hudson Valley Lighting, Murals Wallpaper, Society 6, and The Garage Collective. I can’t wait to divulge the ways in which each of these awesome companies have helped out over the coming weeks! Thanks for reading!
