Come on in..

but just be warned- I didn’t clean first.

As many of you know that have been reading my blog for a while, we did a major renovation on our house a few years ago.  It is still a work in progress but I get asked about the laundry room a lot.

And I should tell you- it is not terribly impressive.  It is small, but it is functional.

First I should probably show you where it was.  Many of you that live in older homes know that the laundry is usually located in a less than ideal location.  Usually the basement.

Ours was on the first floor, and it did have a laundry shoot that dumped into the “closet” where the laundry room was, but it was in a horrible location.  In a hallway off the kitchen.  With horrible accordion style doors.  There was no room in there for laundry baskets so they had to be put in the hallway, which meant you had to walk over them to get to the bathroom.

The hallway had a walk-in pantry on the left (which was quite a distance from the kitchen) a coat closet on the right, the long laundry closet on the right and a bathroom on the left.  It ended with the door to the garage.  So we ripped out the entire area, all the closets, pantry- just left the bathroom.  The laundry closet became a dog shower.

Also used to water plants and dirty boys.

the tall pantry was added for mops, vacuum, etc

the coat closet became an open area where we will eventually add built-in cubbies and places to hang backpacks.  For now it holds sports stuff, light sabers, etc

opening all this up was huge.  It was very dark before

` this used to be a walk-in pantry- and our backdoor was the area that is now the banquet (to the left)

look there goes a boy

So after we cleared that area out, we moved the laundry room upstairs.

Previously when you came up the stairs our master bedroom door was where the floor changed direction.  We took some of that room and created a hallway, the (old) masterbath on the left didn’t change, and the master walk-in closet became the laundry room

It’s small but does the job.

Our old master bedroom became Austin’s room

He doesn’t keep a level and ironing board in his room- Andy left those in while finishing up the laundry.

Austin now has his own bathroom (the old master bath), but we won’t go in there.

At the top of the stairs was a cedar closet that we never used so we took it out and added a homework nook.  I love how the stairs are now open a bit on the top.  That used to be solid wall.

Ohh I hate that lamp, it’s gotta go.

Ok, so that’s a bit of the changes that were made to our house.  I will try to do more in the future.