Cob Jockey

Things are moving along. Our drywall should get completely done this week, which means I'll be able to paint the ceiling and lay the floor tile next weekend (hooray!). At that point I think my washer and dryer can start living full-time inside the house again.

But I'll still be carrying laundry into the backyard and through Platform 9 3/4 until the project is completely done, since that plywood door is staying up to protect the bird from fumes etc.

That meant that this weekend, I needed to get the washer/dryer platform finished. And in order to finish the platform, I had to aggressively tackle the problem that's plagued me for so long - what color should the cabinets be?

Trimmed out and wood filled

I built the platform the previous weekend, so this weekend was, in order:

• Trim (my husband had to help me miter...I swear I have a mental disability where spatial reasoning is concerned, and he got a perfect score on the spatial reasoning entrance exam to engineering school so...)
• Moulding
• Woodfilling
• Sanding (medium grit)
• Vacuuming
• Wiping down
• Priming
• Caulking
• Sanding (fine grit, repeat vacuuming and wiping)
• Painting - first coat
• Sanding (same as before)
• Painting - second coat

Finishing work is so labor intensive, it's tempting to just half-ass it, especially since most of this platform will be covered with baskets and appliances, buuuuut I convinced myself I want it to look good, so I'm doing it right.

Test fit with the slide out rack that will get mounted to the platform, and the laundry basket. Everything looks good.

On Saturday I got up to the caulking done, and then spent several hours at my computer tackling my creative block over what the wall and cabinet colors should be (because this piece needs to match the cabinets across the room) and looking at inspiration photos of laundry rooms...

And that turned out to be really freaking hard because almost every laundry room on Pinterest and Google Images LOOKS THE SAME. So many of them are a white-walled, shiplap-covered, "[adjective] farmhouse" style, like modern farmhouse or coastal farmhouse or industrial farmhouse. What even IS a coastal farmhouse, really?

You think I am exaggerating, I am not. Out of all the rooms in the modern American house, the one that has most firmly coalesced around the show Fixer Upper is the laundry room.

I don't begrudge anyone for liking this style, if you love it, you love it, but variety is the spice of life you know?  After scrolling through hundreds of laundry rooms you could barely tell apart, I was ready to run the opposite direction. I mean, let's face it, I'm a "swimming upstream" kind of person anyway, haha.

In the end, I went with...

Our architecture school roommate described it as "1920's Art Deco teal". Possibly the furthest thing from "[adjective] farmhouse" 😂

YEAH. I'm feeling it. It's nearly impossible to photograph, both of our phones want to turn it blue:

It is nothing at all like the color it appears to be here!

When it doesn't look anything close to that color to the human eye.  It has a lot of green in it. "Blue Peacock" is the name of the color.

This is pretty close

With making a statement this loud on the cabinets, the rest of the room will need to be subtle, and that's okay with me.

Just no shiplap.

Laundry room update! Demo day is complete, and it's starting to look like a real room again. And - we have a fully functional door where the disgusting window was!

Monday

Friday

They honestly moved a lot faster than I thought they would. By Monday afternoon they had the whole thing demo'd, and that was absolutely disgusting. Thank goodness we sealed that room off from the rest of the house, and the HVAC system.

Midway through demo on Monday

We took the ceiling down because I was SURE we'd find mold and water damage up there. I mean partially because one day three years ago I came home from a CrossFit Games trip to find 2" of rainwater in my laundry baskets sitting on the counter, and no indication where it came from. We've fixed the roof since then, but still, I just had a feeling.

And I was REALLY REALLY wrong. If you look closely, the bottom chords of the truss are actual two inch lumber notched into the brick. I knew the floor joists were built like that, but I've never seen the top of a wall built like that. They really don't build em liked they used to!

It was perfect under there! No signs of mold or water damage, and the decking looked like it'd been put up yesterday, not 130 years ago. So thanks to not having to do anything else up there, they were able to keep rolling.

My walls really are solid stone. No studs!

#nailedit on the height of the porch steps we poured two years ago

We only ended up having a plywood door for one night, which is well under the two weeks I expected to have one. Last time we replaced an exterior door, we had to rebuild a lot of masonry around it and that had to cure for a long time.

Dooooooooooooooooooor! From now until this project is done, I have to carry my laundry out the back of the house and through this door. Really a small price to pay.

That's all that's getting done this week, my GC asked if it was okay for them to go take care of this other customer today and tomorrow, they have this lady who has been living with NO interior doors for months while her order got hung up by coronavirus, and her doors are finally in. I said go take care of her, I am in no hurry to get this project done. This GC and I have an amazing working relationship as a result of doing our $120,000 big renovation together five years ago, and it means SO much to have someone I trust doing all this.

August of 2015, that's him in the blue checked shirt talking to the HVAC guys about how the F we were going to run ducts in this house. Our GC is a second generation contractor who knows everyone in this town, and it pays off in how well he knows everyone and how much cheaper he's able to get subs than anyone else, if it's something his crew can't do themselves, that is

So they moved my w/d back into the room so I can do laundry this weekend and called it a week. My poor washer and dryer are going to be doing a lot of back and forth until the tile floor is done.

New ceiling! Insulation is getting blown in up there sometime soon, and we're actually having them do the whole house while they're at it. And by that, I mean ceilings only, when you have solid stone walls it's not like you can insulate them!

Just a hint of the brick threshold showing. Hopefully once it's clean and the tile is laid you'll be able to see the strip of red more clearly

Like the shelves in our master closet, the chair rail was hung off giant pieces of wood stuck into the plaster and brick! Crazy! No nails to speak of

This weekend I'm finishing up the platform the washer and dryer will rest on, and then next week should be a full week of drywall!

Decorating this house has always been a challenge. Nick and I's style leans mid-century modern (no surprise given we live in MCM architecture mecca), and it caught us both off-guard when we fell in love with a house that hasn't changed much in 130 years. We've learned to compromise with it - not letting it become a time capsule, but still staying true to its roots.

Since this photo was taken, this room now has teal velvet curtains that match the center of this rug. It's one of my favorite rooms in the house. (This is the only wallpaper we left up from when we bought it - probably dates to the 1930s or 40s)

I'm not fast about making design decisions. I'll leave a room empty for years, thinking about it off and on until inspiration strikes. Some of my worst design decisions happened when I had to make a lot of snap judgments during the original renovation, and I learned my lesson.

The back hallway/laundry room area has always been my decorating Achilles heel. Part of my hangup: you can see four rooms in a row as you look back through the house, the back two being those two, and the sightline needs to be cohesive in some way. You can't just treat each room as of it was its own standalone thing.

In order: Nick's office, kitchen, back hallway, laundry room

Our kitchen floor is no longer sold, so I can't create continuity by carrying that through the back hallway and laundry room. Even if I did, it would butt up against my office flooring on the other side, which is also no longer sold (the common theme here is my total failure to plan ahead!). Plus whatever I do out here has to look good visually next to my purple office too, which is another sightline.

My office walls

Office on the right. The beadboard in the back hallway, at least, is done, painted and staying put, so it's just what to do above it and the flooring that needs decided...eventually...after the laundry room is done.

Anyway, all that is to say: wall and cabinet colors in the laundry room, and what to do with the no man's land back hallway, are going to be the LAST thing I decide. Hopefully once the elements I've already chosen are in place and I can feel the room a little better, inspiration will strike me like a bolt of lightning.

In the interest of not making the laundry room modern with a capital "M", almost all of the things I've picked out hearken back to Victorian-era style in some way, even if they feel modern, and that is very, very intentional.

So far I have:

White subway tile backsplash. Timeless, and will provide continuity from our kitchen, below:

The kitchen sporting its winter buffalo plaid Ruggable rug back in January

Shaker-style cabinets, not sure what color but it won't be white. Carcasses will be from IKEA, doors will be from Semihandmade. No upper cabinets  - I HATE open shelving in kitchens (hate hate HATE HATEHATEHATEHATE whew sorry triggered lol) but in laundry rooms, I'm fine with it, since you don't have cooking grease mist settling on the open shelving.



Countertop will be this one from IKEA. Gotta know when to splurge and when to save, and this will get the job done, as well as provide a much needed injection of warmth and depth in what may be a very light room in the end:


These cabinet pulls and knobs are on order from Lowe's:


The open shelving will be stained wood, maybe a shade lighter than the countertop, and they'll be supported by these reproduction Victorian-era inspired cast iron brackets I got from Etsy, spray painted a soft gold:


I hate stuff sitting on counters, but I couldn't figure out a way to build laundry basket storage into the cabinets, so I hit on this idea to build a washer/dryer platform tall enough to store my baskets underneath. This will also put my W/D at almost eye level, which will be great.


I wanted built-in drying racks, whether they were slide out, or wall-hung or...something else. I stumbled upon the Sheila Maid, a Victorian era ceiling-mounted drying rack on a pulley system. Period appropriate AND space saving? Yes please!


I struggled a lot with the lighting decision. In the end, I went with a long narrow fixture that shares common elements with our three 1890 chandeliers elsewhere on the first floor. The laundry room is long and narrow itself, almost galley style, and I plan to install the fixture's long side parallel to the room's long side

Unless you stand on my washing machine, you'll only ever see the short side of the chandelier, which is about one square foot in size - preventing it from looking super ostentatious like it would if you were always looking at the long side.  At least, that's the thought.  We'll see if I feel that way still when it's up! Also, bonus: it came in way under budget.

This, but you'll never see this side of it.

Finally, the floor. I was SO tempted to put some graphic tile in here, like this:


Victorian era homes often had gorgeous patterned tile floors, so it would be period appropriate. And it's trendy again. But after shopping graphic tile for months, I was never in love with any design enough to pull the trigger and I didn't know why.

I finally realized it's just too bold of a permanent design decision for me. If I hate it in five years, I'm stuck with it because we are NOT redoing this laundry room again.. So I looked for something that felt graphic, but was a little more timeless. Enter this tile, from one of my favorite blogs Young House Love:

Easy to clean and install porcelain that looks like Carrera marble, sign me up

It was a bit of a splurge (even though I reverse image searched YHL's source and got it for hundreds of dollars cheaper at Home Depot, who has the same tile under a different name), but I felt that pull of "THIS IS THE ONE" for the first time, and I knew I could live with this forever. You know, that whole Konmari "spark joy" thing. I get heart eyes when I look at it.

Whew. That was a long rundown. But all of those decisions had to be made and materials need to be ordered because THE DOOR GETS CUT TODAY!!!

Almost empty and ready for the saw! Goodbye, brown everything!

Horse life may be boring right now, but home life finally isn't! And yeah this post will have nothing to do with horses, but if you like HGTV, this is for you!

The one room we didn't touch during the original renovation of our 1890 home (happy 130th birthday, house!) was the laundry room. And by that, I mean, the room that was the kitchen at the time we bought the house. We initially thought we would "deal with it" as a kitchen and renovate it later, and quickly realized 1. we couldn't deal with it, not even a little, and 2. it made a LOT more sense to do something as big as moving the location of the kitchen during the first big renovation. Couple that with the fact that we had a perfect empty room for a kitchen available, and the house didn't have a laundry room, and a plan was born.

Before and after kitchen:


The laundry room was ugly, but functional, and we hadn't figured it into the original reno costs, so we left it alone. But now we've saved enough pennies to do the laundry room and I'm over the moon. I think you can see why.

I have so rarely taken pictures of this room over the years because it's gross, but now I'm going the opposite direction and showing everyone the unvarnished truth, dog hair from under Hank's cage and all, lol.

This room was originally, in 1890, a detached kitchen, common in those days to prevent the spread of cooking fires to the big house.  Like the rest of the house, it's exterior walls are solid stone, two layers of brick with plaster on top and no air gap.  It still has the original stone threshold from those days, with a slight depression worn from 130 years of peoples' feet.

Plz ignore my cheap, temporary "we know we're renovating this room within the next two years" click lock floor and threshold

In the 1940's, they added an addition that included a hallway between the original house and originally detached kitchen, making it an attached kitchen. Just imagine this strip of Berber carpet as a strip of grass, perhaps with an overhang, and servants carrying food over the stone threshold into what is now the kitchen (which would have originally been a long, narrow dining room in 1890).

New kitchen and 1890 house to the left. Old kitchen/new laundry room and 1890 kitchen to the right. But I'm standing in a 1940 addition to take this photo. When we first saw the house, my brain could not make sense of this layout.

The original kitchen/current laundry room actually wasn't too bad looking when we bought the house.

June of 2015, this was the only place we could plug the fridge in anywhere in the house

We only did as much as we needed to to make it livable, since it did have to serve as a kitchen throughout most of 2015 when we didn't have a kitchen. We painted the cabinets, and then we replaced the linoleum with dark brown super cheap click lock flooring, which in retrospect was an awful design decision but whatever. It was temporary.



By the way, the cabinets do not have drawer slides. Sliding them is a huge pain!



Unfortunately the painted-over blue wallpaper with "milk" and "bread" logos shining through bothered me, so one day I decided I would start ripping wallpaper down and paint the walls, assuming there was a finish plaster coat underneath it like the rest of our house.

Wrong. For reference, this is plaster with a topcoat:


And this is plaster with a browncoat and no topcoat, never intended to be used without wallpaper.


And I have lived with that mistake ever since, having to stare at these ugly walls for another four years. Until now. And I am SO EXCITED TO SEE THEM GO AWAY I CAN'T EVEN STAND IT.
 
So step 1 is going to be turning this window at the back of the room into a door:

This probably looks terrifying to those of you with normal houses, but for us gross windows with old water intrusion stains are par for the course, lol.

Funny story, we poured the patio on the other side of this window two years ago, knowing that needed to be in place before the fence got put in, and we couldn't wait on the fence. So for two years, I've joked that we have Platform 9 3/4 in our backyard:

What's on the other side of that gross window

Doing the door first will give our contractor and his guys (same one we used to do the original renovation) an easy way to get stuff in and out and their own personal entrance into the house.  Partially for parrot reasons and partially for coronavirus reasons, we're gonna completely seal off the opening at the other end of the room so that no dust or germs get into the rest of the house (also there are no air intakes in here) and we can all be safe.  Of course, this does mean I'm going to spend at least a couple of months hauling my laundry into the backyard and then into the laundry room, but hey.  It'll be worth it.

My former roommate modeling the half door that leads to the rest of the house in 2015. Check out the dishwasher on the right! It was from the 60s!

Like last time, our GC will be doing the things we don't want to or can't do ourselves, like, oh, cutting a hole in my 1890 brick wall (EEP, terrifying) and figuring out what to do with the walls and ceiling. (Scrape sand and skim coat? Furring strips with drywall hung off them? I really don't care, but I also don't know what to do, these are solid brick walls so it's not like "take it down to the studs" is a thing). I'll be doing all of the finish work myself - painting, tiling the floor, tiling the backsplash, trim, building a platform for the washer and dryer, and of course, endlessly obsessing about the design.

Since I took this snapshot of my Pinterest board, some of these are winners and some of these are losers.

I'll continue to share over the next couple of months, since I know there are some people here that love this stuff. Thankfully I should be going back to the barn soon, so this blog won't ENTIRELY turn into a home improvement blog!