Thursday, December 30, 2010

Laundry Room


Three posts in, and I’m already behind.  The laundry room is finished.  Well, sort of.  The cabinets are done and the bead board wainscoting.  This is what the cabinets used to look like





And here is the remodeled picture.  






 
I made 4 new doors for the main cabinets and built a new one in the blank space.  I just removed the doors from the existing short cabinet to make two, open cabinets.  My original plan was to just put a shelf in this space.  This, however, did not meet with final approval, thus the new cabinet.  It wasn’t too hard to build – I just put some plywood together and tacked a face frame on it to match the other cabinets.  The tricky part was hanging it.  But all in all it turned out pretty nice.  

Looking to the other side of the laundry room, here’s the before

And the after
The main difference is that I removed a small closet.  This closet was about 20” wide and maybe 10” deep.  Rather pointless: you couldn’t even fit a coat hanger in it.  So I ripped it out to open the space.  It’s now more open, and the dog’s “feeding station” is in this corner.

The "sort of" finished is due to the fact that I need to do something about the exterior doors.  Cold air is pouring through them, and the one leading to the back is too exposed to the elements, and is showing signs of rot.  Examining them I discovered that the rough opening I had was too small for new doors, and I can't exactly "trim" an inch from a fiberglass door...so I did the next best thing.  I bought a storm door. 
I found one for 15% off at Lowe’s, plus I get 30% back in a tax credit, so the door is only going to cost about $100.  And it took about an hour to install.  This is now installed, and has helped a LOT.  The laundry room used to be freezing; it’s now stabilized.  In the process of examining the doors, though, I found that there was no insulation around them – two sticks of trim were all that was preventing cold air from coming in.  So I sprayed some foam around them as well.  I can only assume that every other door and window is the same.  One thing at a time, Jeff.   I just need to re-do the thresholds on the doors and they should be good.
Laundry Room: check.