The House on the Hill

Renovating a house from the 70s in the South.

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Surprise! We’re Renovating Our Kitchen

June 12, 2019

I know I disappeared again and I know I owe you guys a bajillion blog posts but life has been chaotic. We’ve been dealing with unexpected issues at the house, work has been the busiest it’s ever been, and unfortunately I’ve had another family member in the hospital. I finally have a moment where I feel like I can take a break so I thought I would catch you up on what’s going on at the house.

In my last post, we were in Week Five of the One Room Challenge and I was semi-confident we would end up with a half-finished dining room and a finished pantry. BOY WAS I WRONG.

What we ended up with was an unexpected kitchen renovation.

If you follow me on Instagram, you already know all of this but for those of you who don’t, here is a run down of everything that has happened since my last post.

  • As we were finishing up tile removal in the kitchen to prep for new floors, we found a bunch of old water damage. It was clear that there had been some sort of major sink leak before we bought the house. The leak was fixed and new tile floors were put down over the water logged particle board subfloor. Unfortunately, all of that subfloor was unsalvageable due to damage and mold.

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  • Because the damaged subfloor ran under the lower cabinets, we had to remove all of those cabinets to remove the floor. We tried to salvage as many as we could but the sink cabinet was completely unusable. We had planned on scrubbing the bank of cabinets that made up the peninsula and replacing the bottom center support but the cabinet began to fall apart when we tried removing the old support and the entire bottom of the cabinets was covered in mold. We were able to salvage 3 cabinet bases but have since decided to replace two of those instead of putting in the work to convert them to drawers (all thanks to the extreme generosity of Kyle’s parents; thank you again!).

 

  • While we were at it, we also took out all of the upper cabinets. We had planned on doing a mini kitchen makeover for the Fall One Room Challenge this year which was going to include removing those cabinets anyway so since we had the dumpster and we were already having to work on the kitchen we decided to just go ahead.

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  • We replace all of the damaged subfloor and started working on electric and patching the drywall a couple of weeks ago and now we’ve started installing cabinets and hope to start on counters soon.

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I think that just about covers everything! Work stopped pretty much immediately on the dining room and we got the pantry functional enough to hold a lot of our kitchen crap while we finish the kitchen. I’m working on putting together a post on what our plan is for the kitchen and another showing how far into that plan we are but I’m also posting updates on Instagram as we are able to get work done. Once we finish the kitchen, we will go back to finishing the dining room and pantry and then we plan on taking a nice long break…of at least 2 months.

We are doing this kitchen on an extremely small budget but I think it will all come together! I’m very excited and very nervous all at the same time. It already feels a thousand times bigger without the peninsula though so whatever it ends up looking like, I know it’ll be a huge improvement functionally.

Hoping to get the next couple of posts up fairly soon but it just depends on how much time, energy, and motivation I have over the next few days.

Thanks for sticking around!

One Room Challenge Spring 2019: Week Five

May 3, 2019

I’m just going to pretend that I didn’t totally miss my week 4 post.

WEEK FIVE!

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Otherwise known to me as the oh crap we only have one week (really less than that) but three weeks worth of work to do. Honestly, we’re still working on demo in some parts of the space and we just added something else to our scope of work. I’m not confident that everything will be finished but I am confident that at least one of the two spaces will be ready for their reveal next week.

The dining room is still a gigantic mess but we got the new garage access door in! Big shout out to our brother-in-law Brandon for picking the new door up for us and coming over and helping get it installed. Somehow, we managed not to lose either of our cats while we had a giant hole in our house for 3 hours on Sunday.

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We almost had a major set back here. The door got here last Friday and I got an email that it arrived “broken” with no other details but that I could come inspect the damage and see what I wanted to do. I was really unsure how in the world a solid wood door would have gotten broken in transit but I was interested to see what the deal was. Thankfully, the part that was broken was just one side of the door jamb.

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We had decided to pay extra for a pre-hung door for the convenience factor but the door itself was pretty much fine so we decided to keep it and just ask for a discount because it was going to take another month to get a new door in. Let me say this, I do not have a lot of nice things to say about the HomeDepot.com customer service (not just over this issue) but our in-store customer service team is amazing. First, the dot com representative tried to give me 5% back on what was essentially an unusable door jamb when I could have purchased the same exact door without the jamb for $70 less. By keeping the door I was going to have to buy a new door jamb which was going to set me back $50. The in-store rep pushed and got me my $50 back and then they comped us the new door jamb kit. It all worked out in the end. We still have finishing work to do but it’s in which is major! Here it is from the garage side:

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The pantry has also started to see some serious progress.

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Going into the final week (where most people are styling and shooting their spaces), we still have a ton to do:

DINING ROOM:

• Remove tile floors and layer of plywood underneath – In Progress
• Remove baseboards (the tile was laid after so the baseboards are stuck until the tile is gone)
• Remove window trim
• Remove blinds
• Add faux board and batten – In Progress
• Add garage access door
• Install new trim for window and new doors (garage and pantry)
• Lay flooring
• Install new baseboards
• Paint trim – In Progress
• Paint walls – In Progress
• New blinds
• Paint/replace dresser (also a maybe)

PANTRY:

  • Finish demo
  • Have exposed pipes cut and capped – probably not before the ORC is over
  • Have vent moved to make room for new entrance
  • Frame new entrance in dining room
  • Close up old entrance in hallway
  • Install lighting
  • Add light switch
  • Hang/finish drywall in pantry – In progress
  • Build cabinets and shelves – No cabinets, just shelves
  • Lay flooring
  • Paint
  • Add counter – change of plans, not doing this anymore

Those to-do lists don’t even include all the little stuff like patching nail holes, sanding down the old base plate in the pantry, caulking, etc. There’s a lot to do and only one more weekend to try to make a dent. Go check out what the other guest participants are up to here! And check back next week for our finished pantry and what I’m expecting will be our partially finished dining room.

One Room Challenge Spring 2019: Week Three

April 18, 2019

Week 3! That means we’re halfway through.

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Well, it’s the halfway point for the One Room Challenge but I’m definitely not halfway through with our dining room and pantry. IT’S OKAY I’M NOT PANICKING.

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I know! I know. It looks like we’re never going to finish. I had planned on moving everything out of this room to do the floors, paint, and new trim but honestly there’s just nowhere else to put this furniture right now so we’re having to work around it.

We actually have gotten a good bit done in the last week although the air register that needs to be moved for us to really make headway on the pantry remains where it’s been. That’s okay though, we came up with an alternate plan today that will make everything easier and we’re dropping OG off at my mom’s for an afternoon this weekend so we can really crank out some work. I’m hoping Saturday will bring us a mostly put together pantry. Any by “put together” I mean like, I hope we most of the walls covered and the new entrance framed in. We’ve gotten some drywall installed here and there but that new entrance is crucial and it’s a two person job. I did at least finish getting drywall up over the old entrance to the closet. It’s not taped, mudded, sanded, or painted but at least it’s finally closed up!

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This week I also got up one coat of the green paint on the lower half of the dining room walls. I’m planning on painting one coat on all of the new trim before we install it and then just doing a second coat on everything all at once (and a third if I have to). The window trim and baseboards will be replaced but I don’t want to take down what’s there until we’re ready to install the new stuff.

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Other than the pantry, the floors are the other big thing that need to get done. It’s week 3 and yes, I’m still removing tile but I’m having to do it in sections and I only have short time spans to work. We haven’t even talked more about the new garage access door and the last time I checked, the door hadn’t even shipped yet so I’m starting to get a little nervous on that front. As of now it’s supposed to get here at the end of the month which doesn’t leave us much time to get it installed and all of the trim work done.

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Here’s how our dining room to-do list is looking:

• Clean out room (move my workstation upstairs, move out furniture and random crap) – NOPE. Working around the crap.
• Remove tile floors and layer of plywood underneath – In Progress
• Remove baseboards (the tile was laid after so the baseboards are stuck until the tile is gone)
• Remove window trim
• Remove blinds
• Add faux board and batten
• Add garage access door
• Install new trim for window and new doors (garage and pantry)
• Lay flooring
• Install new baseboards
• Paint trim
• Paint walls – In Progress
• Paint Ceiling
• New blinds
• Paint armoire (this is a maybe right now) Taking off the list
• Paint/replace dresser (also a maybe)

It wasn’t technically on the to-do list, but I did manage to find a small piece of furniture to put next to the new door to the garage where we can drop our keys and mail. We’re picking it up next week!

Let’s see if we’ve done any better in the pantry:

  • Finish demo
  • Have exposed pipes cut and capped
  • Have vent moved to make room for new entrance
  • Frame new entrance in dining room
  • Close up old entrance in hallway
  • Install lighting
  • Add light switch
  • Add outlet (this is a maybe right now) – Decided against this
  • Hang/finish drywall in pantry – In progress
  • Build cabinets and shelves
  • Lay flooring
  • Paint
  • Add counter
  • Find antique door for entrance – I don’t think we’re going this route anymore but we’ll see. Right now it looks like we’ll be building custom doors but maybe not in time for the reveal.

Make sure you go check out all of the other participants right here! Week 4 is usually when things get really crazy and I’m looking forward to it.

One Room Challenge Spring 2019: Week Two

April 11, 2019

It’s week two and I already feel behind! This is basically the project of 1,000 issues (aren’t they all?) and our attempts to move an air register and to wire the new light and switch for the pantry have both failed so far. We have made some progress though – I’ve been working on demoing all of the old tile and we’ve got some new drywall up in the pantry. This weekend we should finally be able to move the air vent, wire the new light and switch, finish putting up the drywall, and start painting the dining room. I’m hoping we can also get the new pantry entrance opened up and the old entrance closed off but we really only have one work day and a child that doesn’t sleep through construction.

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Since I don’t have a lot of visual progress to share, I thought I would share a bit more about our plan for the dining room now that we have a better idea of what direction we’re going.

First, we picked a color! I sampled 7 different greens that ranged from bright to blue to almost black and we landed on Northern Glen by Behr.

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I had a list of 5 greens to try initially that I found on Pinterest but when I went to Home Depot, they could only find 3 of them to paint match. While they were getting those samples together, I browsed the paint chips and that’s when I saw Northern Glen. It’s dark and it’s a true green which I love (not too brown, not too blue). I’m planning on putting up some faux board and batten around the dining room and painting it this color. The top part of the walls will be Benjamin Moore China White which is the color we chose for our foyer and will eventually go in the family room, too.

I would love to get a new dining table but for now we’re sticking with the one Kyle built when we first moved into this house 6 (!!) years ago and the dining chairs his parents got us as a gift a few years ago. I still love the chairs (I don’t have a picture of the current chairs, sorry!) but would love to get the seats recovered at some point; just not sure what direction I want to go with those.

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We’re also contemplating switching out that light fixture. We bought it years ago at Costco and put it in the dining room and another in the stairwell. I still love it but with the green and the wood-look floors I’m thinking a wood bead chandelier might look really pretty in here. We have one that we bought for our bedroom and haven’t put up yet so we’re playing with the idea of seeing how it looks in here. We would have to rewire this light anyway to lower it down to the appropriate height so we may as well just see which fixture we like better. Here’sthe chandelier that we still have boxed up somewhere:

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Of course part of me thinks it might just turns into a dusty nightmare so I don’t know.

We’re also carrying our laminate floors into the dining room and pantry from the foyer and I’m so excited to get rid of this gross flesh colored tile! It’s been a long time coming. I briefly thought that Home Depot didn’t carry our flooring anymore and decided to just put our house on the market and be done with it because that’s a completely calm and logical decision to make. In the end, it turns out they just moved it to a different spot so we’ll save the moving boxes for another day.

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There are a couple of things I want for this room that I’m not sure will happen in the next four weeks.
• I would really love to get a big rug to go under the table but I’m cheap and rugs are expensive.
• I’m pretty set on finding an antique door for the pantry but since those are harder to source than normal doors, I’m not sure I’ll be able to find one in time.
• We need something to the left of where the new garage access door will be – maybe a hutch? Or just a side table of some sort? I need to wait and see what the spacing is like once the door is in but we’d like a place for a bowl for our keys and to drop our mail. For now we might just move our giant armoire over but it doesn’t really help us with the keys/mail situation.

So that’s it for this week! Make sure you check out all of the other guest designers right here.

One Room Challenge Spring 2019: Week One

April 4, 2019

It’s that time again!

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This will be our 4th One Room Challenge but we completely failed to finish our spaces for #2 and #3. I’m hoping to turn things around with this one though. If you’re not familiar, the One Room Challenge is a biannual event where designers, bloggers, and Instagrammers work to finish a space in 6 weeks. It’s not a competition, but instead it promotes community. It also gives you a deadline which can work as a major motivator if you have a space you are wanting to re-do or finish.

If you’ve been following along, you know that we were already attempting to renovate our laundry room but after several setbacks, the laundry room renovation turned into a laundry room and separate pantry renovation. I’m guessing you guys think this will be our One Room Challenge space and you would be right and wrong.

The budget we started with has been cut down a good bit since I ended up needing several hotel stays, several tanks of gas, and food while traveling when my dad was in the hospital (for those that don’t know, my father was recently hospitalized for about a week and a half after suffering a major heart attack and has since passed). Because of that, I have decided to put the laundry room on hold for just a little bit while we work on the pantry. We still have a couple of things we’ll have to do in the laundry room to make our other spaces work but trying to finish the pantry and laundry room completely in 6 weeks especially when I’m not sure how the budget is going to shake out just seems like I’d be setting myself up to fail. Both projects will add function to our house but the pantry excites me more at the moment. So for now, I’m sticking with our closet-to-pantry project.

Here’s how the closet (which we used for our cats) looked a few weeks ago:

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And here is where we’re at now:

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Here is our pantry to-do list:

  • Finish demo
  • Have exposed pipes cut and capped
  • Have vent moved to make room for new entrance
  • Frame new entrance in dining room
  • Close up old entrance in hallway
  • Install lighting
  • Add light switch
  • Add outlet (this is a maybe right now)
  • Hang/finish drywall in pantry
  • Build cabinets and shelves
  • Lay flooring
  • Paint
  • Add counter (this is a maybe depending on the cabinet/shelving configuration we decide on)
  • Find antique door for entrance (fingers crossed!)

So now you’re probably thinking “You’re just doing a pantry? Really? What are you doing with the other 4 weeks?” First, keep in mind that we’re building up from the studs here and we only really get to work on our house on the weekends (and one of those during the ORC is already full meaning no work will get done). Second, since we’re adding a pantry where there used to be a closet and re-configuring the layout so that the entrance is in the dining room, I thought it might be fun to add the dining room into our ORC plans. All we’ve done to the dining room since we moved in is paint it 1.25 times and change out the ceiling fan for a light fixture (the room was marketed as a “Florida room”) so it’s probably about time to make it look decent.

Here’s a listing photo from when we first saw the house:

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And here it is right now in all of its glory:

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The dining room project will be pretty small but I’m hoping it will have a big impact. Eventually we’ll change out the crown molding, add a couple of windows, add built-ins, and change out the existing window for a sliding door but that’s all down the road. Here’s the initial to-do list for the One Room Challenge:

  • Clean out room (move my workstation upstairs, move out furniture and random crap)
  • Remove tile floors and layer of plywood underneath (already started)
  • Remove baseboards (the tile was laid after so the baseboards are stuck until the tile is gone)
  • Remove window trim
  • Remove blinds
  • Add faux board and batten
  • Add garage access door
  • Install new trim for window and new doors (garage and pantry)
  • Lay flooring
  • Install new baseboards
  • Paint trim
  • Paint walls
  • Paint Ceiling (this is a maybe since the ceiling continues into the kitchen and down the hall into the foyer)
  • New blinds
  • Paint armoire (this is a maybe right now)
  • Paint/replace dresser (also a maybe)
  • Bring furniture back in

So, that’s the plan! I’ll be honest and say I don’t have a design plan 100% nailed down but I’ve picked up some paint samples and have an idea of what I want. I really can’t design the pantry until we’ve got the new entrance framed out and the old entrance closed in but I have a rough idea of what I want to do in there, too.

Now go check out what everyone else is up to here! There are always so many gorgeous transformations that come out of the One Room Challenge and I can’t wait to see them.

Laundry Room Renovation: When One Project Becomes Two and a Half

March 19, 2019

Last time I posted about the laundry room, I mentioned that we had once again had to change our plan. This project has given us some serious issues from the start but as of right now, the newest floor plan we’ve come up with is a go!

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This means that instead of one project, we actually have two and a half.

First, the former laundry room with garage access will transition to purely a laundry room with lots of storage. We’re still planning on removing the wall between the laundry room and the hall closet/built-in bench to open the space up and adding floor to ceiling cabinets.

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Our new plan for the laundry area is to leave the washer and dryer side by side instead of stacking them. We want to build a platform for the machines to sit on that would have some storage capability or potentially house the litter box for our cats and we’ll add back some upper cabinets, too. Now that we won’t have the access to the garage in this space, we can frame that door in and put in floor to ceiling cabinets for plenty of storage (I’m thinking cleaning supplies, pet supplies, maybe some seasonal decor, etc).

The second project is transitioning the old cat closet to a new pantry!

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Our plan here is to relocate the entry from the hallway to the dining room. I’d really love to use an antique door with a large glass pane here but I’m not sure I’ll be able to find one. Moving the door to the long side of the pantry will allow us to put in shelving across the back wall and around the short wall on the left. I’m trying to decide exactly what I want to do in here and whether I want open shelving around the whole space or if I want a mixture of shallow cabinets and open shelving. Not sure but I’m pretty sure this is where I’m going to put the orange grove mural I ordered from Society6.

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We’ll be able to move a lot of our lesser used kitchen stuff in here (large serving dishes, pastry board, stand mixer, items we use when we host a party, etc). The best part is that this will open up the other hall closet for who knows what.

And in case you’re wondering, the dining room is project #2.5. Here’s a listing photo:

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This room was marketed as a Florida room (which it 100% is not) but for us it makes the most sense as a dining room. We haven’t done much of anything in this room other than paint and change out the ceiling fan to a pendant light and I don’t plan on this becoming an entire makeover right now but since we’ll be adding two doors to the wall on the right (one to the pantry and one to the garage), I’m thinking of maybe adding some sort of wall treatment like faux board and batten across the room. I’m kind of thinking about using dark green in here but that also seems to have blown up across Instagram and design blogs so I’m hesitant (although that didn’t stop me and my love of navy so we’ll see).

We’re waiting on one quote to come through before we get started and I’m not sure what our schedule is looking like at the moment but I’m hoping we can finally start making some progress soon now that we have a floor plan that will actually work!

 

Weekend Report

March 8, 2019

Y’all it has been a week. I am super pumped it’s the weekend!

-Tomorrow I get to see my best friend and her girls (and her husband I guess. HI, TOM). It’s been way too long and I’m excited to finally meet her baby girl who was born at the end of last year.

-OG had the flu last weekend and it wasn’t as bad as I feared but still not great. As much as I love being with her, I think we were all glad to get back to our schedules on Tuesday. I even went into the office for a few hours just to get out of the house (I normally work from home on Tuesdays).

-I’m planning on talking about our new new laundry plan next week since our old new plan isn’t going to work. You can read about that here if you missed it.

-The wall mural I ordered for the laundry room was delivered this week and it’s gorgeous and I love it but it won’t work in the laundry room now. Any suggestions?

-We are coming up on our 6 year house anniversary! Sometimes it feels like we haven’t done anything in this house and then I look back at pictures and realize we’ve actually done quite a lot. I’m planning on putting together an anniversary post next month with a few before and after photos although we don’t have many (or maybe not any) true afters. Lots of “in progress” shots that are far better than the before.

The fact that we’ve lived here almost 6 years is huge. My family moved from house to house when I was growing up (I lived at over 20 addresses by the time I was out of college) and it’s been nice to be so settled. Sometimes we talk about putting our house on the market because we could make a good deal of money off of it but then where would we go? We’ve both agreed that while this might not be our forever house like we intended it to be, we’d have to find something pretty special to make us move. Either that or we’d have to outgrow our house.

-I am one of those rare people who doesn’t like to travel. I’m really a homebody and crave the comfort of being at home on my sofa but I have the strongest sense of wanderlust right now. Like, if I could pack up today and go I think I would. I’m desperate to get back to Alaska. We went on a cruise in 2013 and I’ve wanted to go back ever since but lately it’s pretty much all I want to do. It’s definitely out this year but maybe next year? We’ll see. Of all the vacations we could go on it’s probably the most expensive so it would probably come down to a big house project vs. a vacation.

Here’s a shot of the Mendenhall Glacier from our last trip:

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Happy weekend!

Laundry Room Renovation – The Plot Twist

March 5, 2019

Well, there have been some interesting developments in the laundry room renovation. We started getting plumbing quotes over the weekend to move our washer from its current location to the newly planned laundry nook. As a reminder, here’s the current floor plan:

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And the floor plan we had settled on after our initial floor plan didn’t work out:

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After looking into everything, it turns out that the only place to really have the washer downstairs is right where it is.

WOMP WOMP.

I won’t get too into the specifics, but basically the way the plumbing would have to be run into the nook would cause us to lose about 8 inches from the back wall which would make it way too tight to comfortably do laundry. The nook was already going to be cozy and losing 8 inches just makes it nearly non-functional. We do potentially have the option to move it upstairs which is appealing since that’s where all of the bedrooms and full bathrooms are but the only place for it there is our bathroom which would work but our bathroom is already on the small side and I don’t really want to have to squeeze another function into that space.

So, the fact that we have to leave the washer and dryer where they are is bummer number one. Bummer number two is the garage entry. We had hoped to slide the garage access a few feet to the right so that we could add cabinets to the current laundry room to give us some much needed storage. The problem with that is that the spot we wanted to move it is actually the worst possible spot to move it because there’s so much going on structurally. Beams, posts, etc. So not only can we not move the washer and dryer into their little nook but we also can’t move the door which means there’s no room for cabinets. Sure, we could put one large floor to ceiling cabinet where the old hall closet/bench was but that wouldn’t make the space feel any bigger and could potentially cause even more space/bottleneck issues. And then there’s bummer number three; the ceilings. The ceilings in the old cat closet and the laundry room are about 6.5′ which means they are super low. I think standard ceiling height is 8′ and even that’s a little low for me but it’s what we have in most of the house. I don’t know what mess somebody did to this house but the plumbing is crazy and unless we want to basically change the plumbing layout in our entire house, we can’t raise the ceilings much. We can maybe get 2″ through most of the space.

What does that all mean? It basically means that we can’t do much of anything that we intended to do and I tore all of the drywall down in the old cat closet for almost nothing. I mean, the drywall really needed to be done because as you can imagine, having a closet dedicated to cats caused some unpleasant lingering odors.

BUT! Not all hope is lost. The problem with the existing laundry/garage access combo is that it’s just too small of a space to accommodate both. We also desperately need more storage but that’s just a bonus of any new floor plan at this point. So, if we can’t move the laundry we’ll just have to move the garage access. New floor plan #3:

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To be completely transparent, we think we can easily move the garage access to the back wall of the garage into the dining room but we don’t know that for sure. We’ll have to open up the wall to make sure we’re not dealing with anything too structural but if we can move it, we’ll be able to keep the laundry as is (which means no big plumbing cost) and we’ll be able to add about 5ft of cabinetry which means lots of storage. Coming into the house from the dining room will actually be great for bringing in groceries and it only slightly changes the future plans we had for the room so even though I had some initial hesitation there, we’re starting to get really excited about this possibility. We are not combining the existing laundry room and the cat closet anymore so instead that cat closet will become a pantry (more storage!!) and we’ll move the entrance to it to the dining room side as well instead of the hallway. We do have one air vent that will need to move to make this happen but that’s really it. I would love to find an old weathered half lite door to use for the new pantry or maybe buy a new one and make it look weathered.

The downside to the new laundry plan is that there isn’t really much wall space to use that wallpaper that I ordered so right now I’m trying to decide if I’m going to use it somewhere else (the new pantry maybe?) or if I’m going to return it. The upside is that now we get two spaces to design and we have an opportunity to try to learn/improve some new skills.

Remember when I said this project was going to be slow? Well, now it’s going to be on pause for a bit because we’ll have to do some clean out in our garage before we can get to the area that we need to open up for the new access into the house. We won’t even have a chance to start doing that until next weekend because this weekend is already packed. I’m thinking we might actually save this project just a few more weeks for the Spring One Room Challenge but there will be lots of planning and investigating in the meantime to make sure that this plan will even work.

Fingers crossed!

Laundry Room Renovation – The Plan

February 26, 2019

I am so excited about this laundry room renovation but so overwhelmed at the same time. We’ve taken a room down to the studs before but this is the first time that we’re actually taking down walls and moving things around to change the way a room works. We’ve never had plumbing moved and we’ve only had minimal electric work done. Other than building our deck, I’d say this is the biggest and most complex project we’ve done which means this post will probably be a long one.

First off, I’m pretty sure of the design plan but I won’t know for sure until we have the floor plan nailed down 100% and we won’t know that until after we meet with our plumber to talk about moving the washer hook ups. I do know that I want to use navy cabinets (real shocker there, am I right?) and potentially some sort of wall treatment like board and batten or maybe some tongue and groove planks to match the playroom in the front of the house. I know that I definitely want to use this wall mural from Society6 and we’ll need some hooks and maybe a bench to keep the mudroom functionality of the space. The built-in bench we had really just collected junk so if we do get a bench it’ll be something small that doesn’t work as well for a crap pile.

Society6 Orange Grove

I don’t usually use a lot of bold design in our house because I get tired of patterns really easily but I love this large print mural. I haven’t decided if I’ll use it to cover a full wall or if I’ll use it above a wall treatment. I think I need the space to be finished to the point of drywall before I really decide on that. Originally, I was on the lookout for a lemon print paper because I love yellow and navy together but everything was such a small print and looked too busy. Young House Love used this wall mural in one of their beach houses and as soon as I saw it, I knew it was the one.

So basically the potential design plan is this: white walls, carry the laminate floors through from the rest of the downstairs, navy cabinets, bold wallpaper, and a possible wall treatment for the lower half of the walls.

Now let’s talk about the floor plan. This is the current floor plan (obviously not drawn to scale but you get the idea):

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What you can’t tell from this is how tiny the laundry room really is (5ft x 6ft) which has to accommodate our washer and dryer and two doors that swing into the room. The bench was a closet with bi-fold doors when we moved in and the barn door was added last year across a wide opening that separates the foyer from the laundry/closet/powder room area.

When we first started talking about this space, we came up with this floor plan:

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This basically just opened the room up on both sides, taking down all of the walls, and allowing us to push the washer and dryer back a couple of feet and adding cabinets.

After we started tearing down the drywall in the cat closet, we decided to change our plan. There’s just too much plumbing and electric to move and we have a pretty firm budget for this project so we don’t want to have to worry about costs escalating out of control. So for right now we’ve landed on this floor plan but obviously things could still change:

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With this option, we can leave half of the wall between the cat closet and the current laundry room where most of the plumbing and electric is. We’ll tuck the stacked washer and dryer into the nook that would be created by doing that and open up the other half of the wall as the entry point since the cat closet door in the hallway will be going away and replaced with drywall. Then, we can add cabinets in the current laundry room for some much needed storage. We’re also hoping we can move the garage entry to where the bench was just to give us the maximum amount of storage space.

I hope you guys will hang with me through this. I know our projects tend to go slowly but we can pretty much only work on weekends and we plan on hiring out the plumbing because that’s something I don’t want us to mess with and screw up. It will be slow but depending on permits and the plumber, I’m hoping we can at least start putting the space back together with new drywall sooner rather than later. We’ve already torn out all of the drywall in the cat closet and some around the bench area and now we plan on holding off on anything else until the plumber comes out to quote us on moving our washer hook ups and maybe some of the plumbing in the ceiling. I’m going to do a little tour on my Instagram Story today that I think I’ll add to a highlight as well to give you guys a better idea of the space and how they all currently work (or don’t work) together.

Here’s our giant to-do list or at least all of the things I can think of. These are not necessarily in any sort of order:

– Demo cat closet
– Demo bench/closet
– Remove wall between existing laundry room and bench/closet
– Remove part of wall between existing laundry room and cat closet
– Get permits
– Call plumber for quote
– Have washer/dryer plumbing hooks ups moved
– If possible, have plumbing in ceiling re-routed so we can raise ceiling
– Have misc plumbing moved out of the way and hidden behind walls
– Move outlets for washer/dryer
– Remove tile in existing laundry room
– Level floors
– Remove cat closet door and replace with drywall
– Install can lights
– Move garage entry door (if possible)
– Frame in old garage entry and add drywall
– Put up new drywall where necessary (some walls, ceiling throughout)
– Prime/paint walls and ceiling
– Install floors
– Install trim
– Hook up and stack washer and dryer in new location
– Buy/paint/install cabinets
– Buy/install wall mural
– Wall treatment?
– Add hooks
– Buy/build bench
– Fix poorly done electric from past owners (or builder, hard to tell)

Laundry Room Renovation

February 19, 2019

It’s happening!

We had originally said we weren’t going to do any new projects this year but I am super excited to tell you guys that we have decided to go ahead and renovate our laundry room! This picture is several years old but the room is an out of control mess right now so here it is at its nicest.

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The laundry room in our house is tiny. I think it’s roughly a 5×6 space that fits our washer and dryer, the door to the garage (which opens into the laundry room), and another door into the rest of the house (which also opens into the laundry room). It’s also the very first room we “finished” when we moved in by painting the cabinets and walls and adding a counter over the washer and dryer. This is what it looked like when we moved in.

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Before adding the barn door in our foyer, we would regularly keep the laundry room door closed so that we didn’t have to worry about any of our pets running out when we came in from the garage. Any time we would both be coming in or out we’d have to do this weird little shuffle dance so that we could close the garage door before opening the other door. It was incredibly obnoxious to do with the two of us, even worse with groceries, and nearly impossible once we added a car seat we had to carry in and out of the house.

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Now that we have the barn door in place, we have been leaving the laundry room door open and it has helped some but the space is still way too tight. We’re planning on taking down the wall between the laundry room and that built in bench and luckily for us, there is also a closet right behind the laundry room that we can expand into.

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For years we have used this as a place for our cats to do their business and hang out. I feel kind of bad evicting them but we can gain another 2-2.5ft to our laundry room by taking the wall down between the two spaces which I have already started doing.

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Here’s the first draft of the new layout which I already know will need to change:

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That empty corner space is where we had planned on stacking the washer and dryer. Adding the cabinetry is going to add so much function to our downstairs that I can hardly stand it! First though, we have to finish opening up the walls and see what we can do about what’s behind them. I’ve already found a good bit of plumbing, some of which we’d like to move and some we’re hoping we can work around. We also need to take a look in the ceiling because the ceilings in the laundry room and the cat closet are both low – probably about 7ft as opposed to a normal 8ft ceiling.

I’ll get more into the details of what needs to be done, what we plan to do, and what we plan to hire out later this week. We had planned on saving this project for the Spring One Room Challenge but in what is shocking news to absolutely no one, I am way too impatient to wait another couple of months so here we go!

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the house on the hill blog
Southern made. Lover of animals. Married to a New Englander. Slowly renovating our 1970s home.
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