Laundry Lovelies

 Now that the laundry room is all painted and pretty, I feel like it's so much more fun to make it even prettier! This past weekend's weather was perfect for indoor crafty kind of projects - it was all grey and rainy skies here in North-East Florida (not very Floridian at all).

And nothing needs more pretty-fying than the plastic bottle of laundry detergent. Right?

Luckily, I keep some empty Sangria bottles on hand. It's the perfect "summer nights on the porch" drink, if you ask me, and I really love the chunky peasant bottles they sell it in. So I grabbed one, removed the old label and washed it out. Sangria-scented laundry might not be as much fun ... y'know, not to mention possible stains.

Then I whipped up a quick label in publisher and printed it on a shipping label because it has a sticky back and thicker paper. I think this combination together with Modpodge will give it a fighting chance lasting last the abuse of daily laundry action. Right?

I cut out my pretty label and stuck it to the bottle. The area where the old wine label used to be fits just right but even if your bottle doesn't have a flat area like this one, it'll work. Just stick and ...

 Modpodge it all over for protection!

While the label was drying I grabbed a funnel and the old detergent bottle and poured the detergent into its new home. We use "free'n clear" because the husband has allergies and a very sensitive nose but I do keep some nice smelling detergent in a smaller bottle occasionally for a load of my stuff only because I love the smell of scented laundry detergent (some, not all). I should probably make a pretty bottle for that one, too.

And here you go, a pretty bottle for the laundry detergent (still  all bubbly from switching bottles). Can you believe the husband commented on it? He -liked- it! Called it 'chic' ... hehehe.

He does have a point though, since it looks a lot less utilitarian than the regular plastic bottles and just nicer when in plain view. I wonder when they'll be printing more decorative labels. You'd think one manufacturer would have picked up on that already ... something pretty in French, maybe?

Three of Three: First Recap

On my quest to "Get'er Done" and finish some of the projects we started weeks or months or even a year or two ago and inspired by Apartment Therapy's January event "The Cure," I created the infamous Little Old House "Three of Three" List. You can read more about that list in this post.

I simply took our mega "Master List" of projects in and around our little old house and prioritized the projects in each room, choosing the top three for my "Three of Three" list. The idea is that these three projects would finish their respective room allowing me to move most of our tools and equipment and paint buckets into the storage shed and concentrate on creating a home that doesn't look like a partially exploded construction site.


So far I have tackled two rooms: our laundry/mudroom and our kitchen.In each case I am still missing one project out of the "Three of Three" but, boy, did finishing two top priority projects make a difference already!

Laundry Room
1. paint (cabinets, tabletop and part wall) (read about it here, here, here, here and here)
2. install door knobs (read about it here)
3. cover the utilities

Kitchen
1. paint window (read about it here, here and here)
2. add lighting (read about it here)
3. add backsplash (learn more about my musings here)

It's amazing to see how much of a difference finishing these few projects has made (and how painless they were, really. Unlike a certain staircase project ...ahem). We still need to come up with a clever way to cover up the utilities in the laundry room (hopefully this weekend will see some progress) and, of course, we haven't had the time/funds/chutzpah to install a backsplash yet but at least we have begun the decision making process in earnest and that's at least a mini step into the right direction!

Have you tackled any "Get'er Done" projects lately? Which little project made the biggest difference in (almost) finishing a room?

Call Me Mrs. Obvious

... but I obviously enjoy stating the obvious.
Obviously.

After installing "Pull" knobs on the cabinets in the laundry room, I -knew- exactly where to put this cute little iron "Garden" sign.

Where, you ask?

Why, the backdoor to the yard, of course!

Little Man lend a hand and together we measured, marked drill holes and screwed the sign to the back door.

And after two years of grumbling about that one cross brace of the outside screen door always covering up the small narrow window in the door, I went, broke out the screw driver and - gasp!- removed it.

Guess what?

The screen door is just as stable without it (it has two more cross bars below the one I removed),  you can now see out of the back door window, and the world didn't come to an end.

Yesss!

Three of Three: Laundry room - Semi-Finals!

I know, I know.
Bad blogger!
Not only have I skipped several days worth of entries but I also seem to have fallen off of the staircase challenge wagon.

You see, I usually work on house projects on the weekends. During the week life sometimes just gets too busy to accomplish much. Two weeks ago I went on a trip to Tampa and spent some time with a friend, and this past weekend we went camping with Little Man's Cub Scout pack. Add to that that just thinking about the staircase is giving me hives right now and that I managed to throw out my back so squatting on my butt on the floor sanding spindles was painful in more ways than one, and you have a pretty good idea of why there was next to no progress here at the little old house.

Monday I went to see the chiropractor who snapple-crack-popped my  back back into alignment and things started to look up. Still not crazy about the idea of taking on the staircase again, but I did put in some hours in the laundry/mudroom.

Here we go: last I checked in with you I'd started to paint the door to the backyard and the then exterior, now interior wall still sporting the siding. Both had been painted a drab grey that seemed to suck the light out of the tiny room.

Even with just a coat of primer, both tied in better into the room and gave it much more space by visually receding. Phew! Just what the doctor had ordered for our little laundry/mudroom!

Here we are with the final coat of glossy white for the door and frame around the breaker box, and the same soft yellow we used in our kitchen and all other laundry room walls on the wall.
So. Much. Better!

Another quarter turn pointed me to another project in the little room: the backside of the door to the kitchen. Yes, I'd painted the other side of the door (the one toward the kitchen) at some point with no concern for the backside.
Heh ... shame on me.

Time to rectify this shortcoming!

First, the door needed a serious scrubbing. Then I went and removed the hardware, and filled up the holes left behind by yet another set of latching locks; they were -everywhere- throughout the house, and on some doors we removed several sets. Ugh!

Time to rough it up! As if the old door wasn't beat up enough already (character - it's character! not to mention solid wood) I gave it the special treatment with the sander. I did take out a few bumps too and smoothed a couple of rough spots.
The few remaining dings are just indicators of the door's age and don't bother me at all. After a hundred year and more than two dozen families calling our little old house home, you get to have a few nicks and wrinkles.

I primed and then painted the door and frame. Paneled doors are painted from the inside out: you start on the inside of the panels, then you paint the horizontal parts of the door and finally the vertical lines.

Three coats of white glossy paint later and some quick touching up with sun-washed yellow along the door frame and we can call this project "DONE"!

Painting the wall to match the others and giving the doors a fresh coat of glossy white paint make a HUGE difference in this tiny room. It feels so much bigger and brighter, my mind boggles!

So, where are we with my "Three of Three" for the laundry/mudroom?

Laundry Room
1. paint (cabinets, tabletop and part wall)
2. install door knobs
3. hide the utilities

Now it's time to get creative and come up with something to hide the breaker box and our electric water heater from sight.

Three of Three: Laundry Room - The adventure continues!

With the cabinets all glossy white and be-knobbed aka outfitted with hardware, it was time to move on to the next part of the To-paint list: part of the wall and the door to the backyard.

Our laundry/mudroom was originally a small back porch. At some point in the life of our little old house it was closed in. Even later (or should that be 'more recently'?) it was fashioned into a full bathroom for the downstair's apartment, and when we moved in we turned it back into a laundry/mudroom since we needed a room for our washer and dryer. We also added a new full bath upstairs and kept part of the former downstair's bathroom as the world's smallest half bath, so we wouldn't end up missing on functioning bathrooms.

In total our little old house is a single-family home with 4 bedrooms and 2.5 baths over 2,184 sqft. Not so little, not so old, but ours all the same!

That the laundry-mudroom of our house was once part of the outside becomes super obvious when you see the part of the wall that still sports the exterior siding. After ripping out the old bathroom's tile and painting the new drywall with the same sweet yellow paint we used in the kitchen, the grey siding and door stuck out like a sore thumb.

Since I actually love the look of the siding - people keep putting paneled walls in all the time - and the reminder of what this area used to be before it was closed in, I decided to just paint both wall and door to make them tie into the rest of the room.

So here I am, priming the wall (and ready to tackle the door next) after scrubbing everything down and giving it a quick sanding.
Even with just the part of the wall primed, the whole room is starting to look bigger and brighter (other than the window in the door there is no window in my laundry room). I figure by the time I'm done, the room will have about doubled in size ;o)

Mission Cabinets: Day 3

On my third afternoon in the laundry/mudroom I finally got to add the final two coats of white glossy paint. Hurray!

I'm telling you, watching HGTV is one of the biggest mistakes you can make when DIY around your house.
New kitchen in 45 minutes? Check!
Entire house remodel in a weekend? Check!
In reality, everything takes just so much longer (*cough* staircase .... *cough-cough*) and that discrepancy between your HGTV experience and real life can sometimes be overwhelmingly frustrating.

Anyways, I finally got to paint the cabinets a clean, fresh, bright glossy white!

It's nothing really to write home about - no fancy-schmancy design fit for a magazine - but it makes our small laundry-mudroom look so much lighter and feel so much bigger already - something this narrow passageway jam-packed with functions sorely needed.

Here's the other half of the room with the new counter top in place and painted the same glossy white as the cabinets. The utilities aren't pretty to look at and I have ideas to cover them up but I love-love-love our electric water heater (tankthetank.com) - endless hot hot water and a teeny footprint, for the win!

Ages ago I'd picked up some cabinet knobs at Michael's (the craft store), for no particular project really, and I thought they might work in a pinch here, so I marked the drill holes.

And drilled holes into the three cabinet doors. I don't know but there's little more anxiety-inducing than drilling into freshly painted (or new) cabinet doors ... eeep!

Aaaaaand up close and personal. And labeled, just in case you get confused and can't figure out whether to push or to pull to open the cabinet door ... heh.

Tada!
Looking at my "Three of Three" for our laundry/mudroom

 Laundry Room
1. paint (cabinets, tabletop and part wall)
2. install door knobs
3. create a 'backsplash' (backing, curtain, something) to hide the utilities

I'm getting really really close to wrapping that room up soon!

Mission Cabinets: Day 2

New day, new luck!
On day 2 I started with vacuuming the laundry room to remove all of the sawdust I'd created by giving the doors and frame a thorough sanding.

Some people swear that using Deglosser is enough to get going on repainting but unfortunately I have seen Deglosser fail spectacularly, and while a short-cut would be nice, the past two years of DIY have taught me that there isn't one, really. At least not one that isn't also temporary.

I also added a make-shift countertop to this area holding our beer fridge by simply screwing a board I had on hand to the top. It fit perfectly, and will give me a place to put things when folding laundry. In a pinch it can even serve as a staging area for outdoor eating when we fire up the grill (Soon! Very soon!).

See the box on the wall? That's our electric tankless water heater, and it ROCKS! Not very pretty to look at (and I have ideas about covering up that area) but so much smaller than a standard water heater and endless hot hot water.

Then I finally broke out the primer!

Even with the splotchy-looking coat of primer on the doors and cabinet frame, our small laundry/mudroom is already looking brighter and much more open. The cabinets visually recede and are no longer "in yo face!" with their glossy oak-y-ness.

Getting there!

Mission Cabinets: Day 1

Our Little Old House had been divided up into a duplex - one apartment downstairs, the other upstairs - and when we bought it, part of our big renovation plan was to return it to its original lay-out as a single family home.

We even went one step further and tore out both existing kitchens, replacing one with a brand-new kitchen from IKEA and the other one with a master bath. Neither kitchen was original to the house, both were gross, and so we didn't shed a tear when we said good-bye to them.

We did, however, save two old kitchen cabinets in the process, one of which we installed in the laundry room for storage (read about it here).

Did you read that post about the laundry room and how we installed the cabinets above the washer and dryer?
Yes?
Did you notice how I talked about the "next step" being paint?
That was in May 2011!
HOLY COW!
TWO years ago I was talking about how next thing I was going to paint those cabinets.

Ahem ... guess something important came up.
Yeah ..or I get sidetracked ... a lot.

I finally got around to painting the cabinets though as part of my "three of three" plan but since DIY and blogging isn't actually what I do for a living, I had to space it out over three days (with a weekend out of town in the middle to boot).

Day 1 of "Mission Cabinets" saw me prepping the area with drop cloths on the floor and old towels on the washer and newly refinished dryer .

Then I removed the doors. Those cabinet door hinges are actually pretty neat and very different from all the other hinges in the house. They sort of clamp onto the cabinet frame and are held in place by one single screw, so taking them down was easy-peasy.

With the cabinet's insides bared to the world, I also realized that there really isn't much rhyme or reason to what and how things are arranged inside the cabinet. It's a random collection of bits and bops (vases, light bulbs, paint testers, etc.).
Time (or opportunity) for some spring cleaning and reorganization, I guess!

 

The doors and cabinet frame are solid wood, stained and sealed with glossy poly, I believe, so first I had to sand them to make sure the paint would stick for any length of time. Usually just roughing it up a bit is enough, but here the sanding took much longer than expected, interrupted with runs to the bus stop to pick up Little Man after school, drop-off and pick-up of Little Man for Karate class and a mad-dash over to Cub Scouts afterward. Then it was time for dinner and collapsing on the couch before crawling into bed. 

Yeah, I love Mondays.

Three of Three: Laundry Room

Some project have this tendency to end up at the bottom of the priority list, not because they are small and inexpensive quick fixes but because they are off the beaten path and don't really have much of an impact on your daily life.
In January I talked about "The List" and how I'd been trying to nail the list for each room down to three main projects in order to "git'er done" (refresh your memory here). Here are my "Three of Three" for the Laundry Room

  [My little laundry nook in the mudroon]

Laundry Room
1. paint (cabinets, tabletop and part wall)
2. install door knobs
3. create a 'backsplash' (backing, curtain, something) to hide the utilities

Starting with project #1 - paint, I decides to add our dryer to the list of items to paint. You see we have had this Kenmore dryer for almost 10 years now (no kidding!) and except for having to replace a broken belt once, this one is still going strong. We got it when Little Man was a baby, and I pretty much run it every other day, sometimes twice a day, or if I have procrastinated on laundry long enough, do a marathon with 4-5 loads until bedtime rolls around. So ...still no need to replace the washer or the dryer, but because they'd been sitting on a half-enclosed backporch while we were still renting, the elements had gotten to them and done a number on our dryer. It had rusty spots on the top, along the edges and around the handle, and it wasn't pretty.

I used "The must for rust" rust remover from Krud Kutter to combat the rust. I must admit this stuff gets me all giddy. You can literally "watch" the rust vanishing. It's pretty neat! I applied it as per instructions, dancing on the spot until all rust was gone.
No need to fear for your hands either - no breaking out in angry rashes, hives or chemical burns when touching the solution. Like I said, very neat stuff.

 

Once the rust remover had done its magic, I grabbed the sander and sanded off any flaky paint and gave the dryer a good cleaning to boot.

Then it was time for Rustoleum's Appliance Epoxy. I made sure to apply the spray paint in nice even, thin layers and kept the door to the backyard wide open, despite the freezing weather outside ...brrrr! but nothing beats proper ventilation. I also used my handy-dandy face mask because nothing is as weird as sticky nostrils because you have been inhaling spray paint. Not like I would know about that ....ahem.

Tada! Looking good, dryer baby! The paint goes on like a spray paint but it seems to be thicker, and takes longer to dry (it stayed tacky for quite a while). I made sure I finished all laundry for the next 4-5 days before tackling this project so the new coat of paint has a chance to dry and cure undisturbed (and nobody has to go naked at the Little Old House because the laundry didn't get done. It's too cold for shenanigans like that!).

Looking brand-new - not fancy, but brand-new! The cabinets will be next so stay tuned for more Laundry room goodness!

Death by laundry

I guess one of the biggest lessons (finally) learned is that order only comes through having a space of its own for everything you own.

At the Ugly Duckling, laundry tends to accumulate quickly and infinitely. My normal state of being is "between piles": the unwashed pile o' laundry and the ready-to-fold pile. And once that is under control, you know, for that half an hour a week, the cord to the iron tries to trip you and the ironing board is lurking in the laundry room just waiting for the moment to whack you over the head good.

When I was over at the Blue Box today, I spied with my little eye this nifty little thing:

[Quick and easy laundry organization? Yes, please!]

That sounded like a quick and easy way of securely coralling the wicked iron and its board into a safe corner and a first step to creating some semblance of order for our laundry situation.

So it went into the cart and home with me.

[Before: Into the corner with you!]

Here's the corner I chose for our unruly iron and its partner in crime, the ironing board, before the installing. All that was required were two holes for drywall anchors and then the shelf was screwed into the wall with two screws. That took all of 5 minutes after locating all necessary tools (a drill, a level and a pencil and a screwdriver)

[After: All well-mannered and orderly!]

So much better! Now the iron has a place to go and hangs nicely secured so unexpected whacks over the head are now a thing of the past. The iron has a nice spot to sit and the starch can go right next to it. And me? I'm tickled about tidy it looks.

Now if I could only make the laundry vanish ...

Laundry room II

You know a room is most likely not a real room unless there's some sort of storage. And while some rooms can get away with a basket or a single drawer as storage, most rooms require a little more oomph in the storage department to become more sufficient/efficient/whatever-cient.

Case in point: the laundry room.

I love having both, washer and dryer inside a room with 4 actual walls. At Silver St the hook-ups were set up on the back porch which was enclosed with lattice panels and it worked for doing laundry if you didn't mind losing the occasional sock to the squirrels (Husband's white sport socks were a popular choice for nesting material] and having to wash off your washer and dryer from the dirt that collected on top and occasionally treating the rust issues.

[Laundry room: new room, new paint, new floors, new trim]

At the Duckling, the laundry rooms is a fully enclosed area. It began its life many years ago as an enclosed porch and was then turned into a full bathroom so the downstairs could function as its own apartment when the house was converted to a duplex. When we bought the Duckling, we removed the bathtub and added that space to the former teeny mudroom which was just just of 4 sqft (or maybe 5, but not much bigger).

After new drywall, paint and floors and with all the new hook-ups in place this laundry room was off to a great start. Except ... no storage. Wop-wop-wooop.

However, we were prepared. Right from the start aka the demolition phase we'd set aside some of the wall cabinets from the former upstairs kitchen. They are simple but solid cabinets, weigh a metric ton and were in good shape. With just a coat of fresh paint inside and out they'd be perfect to help us out with some storage deficits.

[Husband hard at work]

Husband went off to the orange box to pick up more wood for his library shelf project as well as some cabinet screws and right after lunch we kicked off the laundry room wall cabinet project. Yes, we precariously balanced the cabinets atop rubbermaid containers supported by coffee cans. Not your usual DIY approach but it did work! A couple of cabinet screws and battles with rock-hard studs later, we had cabinets in our laundry room. Let's hear it for storage! Wootwoot!

Next step ... paint! (Notice a theme here?)