Laundry Room Check-In

We’ve done a lot and forgot to tell you about it! I can explain. We’ve been super active on social media (@heytheretoots), but sadly neglected our dear precious blog. Can you believe its been TWO months since our last post! Time flies when you’re having fun renovating right? The laundry room isn’t done yet, but we’re soooooo fricken close. Here’s the quick and dirty rundown on everything we’ve accomplished to date. I’ll follow up later with more detailed posts, but first, let’s get you up to speed.

Water Heater Closet: Completion Level = 98%

The closet for the hot water heater is about 98% done. We have four more pieces of trim to add, and then will need to caulk the gaps. Confession: The “door” doesn’t work like a door. We wanted this closet “door” to easily open and close so that if for whatever reason we needed to quickly access the water heater, we could do so. But right now everything is screwed shut. Mainly for the sake of moving this project along until we figure out a way to add this functionality. As of now, If we absolutely must get to the water heater, we can just easily pop off the two end trim pieces and unscrew the screws that are holding the “door” to the frame. We’ll revisit this project at a later date, but for now this temporary solution will work for us. I guess that would change this ranking to a 95% completion level.

Window Trim: Completion Level = 97%

Our “little window that could” has a whole new look! We used leftover wood pieces from the DIY water heater closet to build the cutest window frame. We planned on painting it white, but the natural wood look has really grown on us. As for next steps, we just need to caulk some small gaps, patch the nail holes and maybe apply a light stain.

Wallpaper: Completion Level = 100%

I installed wallpaper for the first time ever and it was super easy! I was incredibly intimidated at first, but I tried the “paint the wall” technique where you basically use a paint roller to apply the paste directly onto the wall. This made it so much easier to transfer and adjust the wallpaper as needed. As you can imagine, the greatest challenge was the sloped ceiling.

Floors: Completion Level = 98%

Come through floor tiles! Josh worked his behind off on this floor and I’m so proud of him. This was the first time for both of us and I think we did a damn good job. We ran into some issues (as expected), and some areas aren’t perfect but I’m really happy with how this floor turned out. We went with black grout because we feared that anything lighter would draw attention to the imperfect spots, while a dark color could mask it. Next steps: Finish sealing the grout.

Baseboards, Cabinets and Trim: Completion Level = 80%

The baseboards are in and we have one last piece of trim to add around the door. I still need to figure out how to caulk the baseboards that are against the walls with wallpaper. My fear is that the wallpaper will get messed up and the caulk line won’t look seamless (my OCD won’t allow that, nope). For storage we’re using IKEA cabinets because they’re affordable and can be customized easily. We’ve already built the frames for the lower and upper cabinets and plan on building a custom base and countertop.

Look at that! We got straight to the point with this post. As mentioned earlier, I’ll do separate posts to go into more details on the process. There’s so much we learned when installing the floors that we just have to share.