Laundry Room: Before and After Photos!

Here are the photos from the laundry room project. I'm really happy with how it all turned out. We will be soon putting some (probably brown) curtains in, but I wanted to share the photos sooner rather than wait until those curtains were installed. Hurray for finished projects!

BEFORE PHOTO: I found my camera charger after I had dismantled some of the shelving. So I took a photo of the shelving so you'd see how much yucky stuff had already been removed.

BEFORE PHOTO: Outside of laundry room. It needs to be pressure washed and painted this upcoming summer. Badly. But this way, you see how the laundry room is a separate entrance.

BEFORE PHOTO: The gosh-awful, disgusting floor before. Mud outside= mud inside. Years of this= caked on grime. This is pretty much the entire walkway inside of the laundry room. Needing to keep clearance for the machines and having any storage in there resulted in claustrophobic nastiness. I had to SAND THIS ALL DOWN BY HAND. So gross.

BEFORE PHOTO: The infamous NASTY shelving, literally made with pallets. I have no problem with projects using pallets, but this one was just funky. There were way too many pieces of wood. Too many nooks and crannies for spiders to hide (and there were a LOT of them). No way to clean the floor (you'll see as such in the next photo). PLUS, the shelves were WAY too deep and oddly spaced vertically. And those vertical beams did not help matters any.

BEFORE PHOTO: Plus, the nasty shelves? Covered the window. I had already removed a bunch in front of the window when this photo was taken, but you get the idea.

BEFORE PHOTO: Window covered by shelving (shelving already partially removed).

BEFORE PHOTO: The gross gross gross floor. Mud and grime. (And my sexy slippers)

BEFORE PHOTO: Apparently, when a prior tenant spilled paint, it wasn't worth cleaning up. That's about a quart of paint! And look at that nastiness grime and dirt in there (that you can't reach because of the pallet).

MIDWAY THROUGH PHOTO: One wall painted. Still a ton of mess.



MIDWAY THROUGH PHOTO: Whoa, the leaning towers of unorganized crud.




MIDWAY THROUGH PHOTO: Nasty old yellow and red spilled paint cleaned up.


MIDWAY THROUGH PHOTO: Where the red paint WAS. It was chipped off. The drips on the wallboard weren't worth chipping because they could be covered and weren't very bumpy (as in, they would show through the paint).

AFTER! Good-bye messy floor. Good-bye unpainted walls (just drywall and spackle before). Good-bye unpainted ceiling. Good-bye clutter. Good riddance horrible shelving.

AFTER!




After! I quickly whipped together the new shelving unit. It's really strong, painted, and does the trick. It also takes advantage of the otherwise-unusable space above the washer-dryer (we have front-loading washer dryers, so we can do this). Enough space was left below the unit to access the dryer dials.



AFTER! Another interior shot. We may eventually put a card table by the window for crafts, sewing, and projects, but for now, it is destined for chick-ville in a few weeks.



AFTER: This is our little freezer. On top of it is my dehydrator and bread machine, two machines that can go out here and be used out here without a problem. And it's really nice to have more space in the kitchen.



AFTER! 100% organized tubs of things, with enough room on top for our snowshoes, and enough room on the side for Maddie's portable carrier and my drill.


So, that's the project. We are so happy with it. It's become a very clean, very flexible space that we actually WANT to go into, whereas before, it was somewhere we dreaded. Cost? Home Depot had a sale on paint, so... $10 for the green paint and $10 for the floor paint. We have leftovers of both, which we'll use probably on the chicken coop. The wood for the rack cost $10 too. So $30 of output total. Since it's a rental, we have to really analyze the cost/benefit to us, since we're improving something we can't take with us. But for $30, now we have, basically, an extra room we didn't have before. Well worth the $30.