Scope Creep

I mentioned in my last blog post that a little “accident” had occurred with our laundry bi-fold doors. They opened right by the back door and let’s just say that if you aggressively open the door while someone is doing laundry with the bifold open, you can actually not only rip it out of the track but you can break the door. That’s how the scope creep happened.

Originally our plan was to deal with our pantry next. To say it was awful was being kind. Whoever thinks adding a 40″ wide pantry with an 18″ door should be shot. And whoever thinks wire shelving is a good idea for a pantry has never tried to put canned goods or anything small in a pantry. This is what we were dealing with.

I recognize this is first world problems, but it was annoying and we had a plan to deal with it. We were going to build a cool pantry cabinet to go in there. But when the laundry door was broken, that idea went out the window.

Scope Creep … cue to last Saturday morning when Keith woke up on fire to demo the whole room. Yep, you read that right. Demo the whole room. In all fairness we had already discussed that we may as well start from scratch in the room. And when I say start from scratch, I mean demoing everything (including the flooring) and starting over. The overall room dimensions are roughly 14’x8′. Since we have a front-load washer and dryer we could stack them, fit in a broom closet and make a small pantry that you can actually reach into which will be approximately 43″x40″.

Let’s start with the flooring. It was slate and honestly it never looked like it was clean (nor was it actually clean). Neither of us love it, and since we removed a wall we have missing flooring where the wall was. This week, we are replacing the slate with a luxury vinyl tile that will be more updated looking and a lot easier to keep clean.

You can see that the slate is very uneven, has lots of grooves and is dated looking. I don’t have a picture of the new floor but will post one once it’s in.

Here are a few pics of the overall room before demo.

Another thing we didn’t like about the house is on the other side of the wall from the laundry room and that was the faux vent hood box. Because we have a Jennair cooktop (which sucks, by the way), it had a downdraft, but whoever renovated the kitchen put a pretend vent hood box above it with a light in it. We will replace the cooktop sometime in the future, but now was the time to deal with the vent hood.

The light was just dumb as you can see from the picture on the left. In order to put in a new vent hood, we needed to run a new exhaust pipe from it to the existing exterior hole. Which required removing additional drywall behind the washer/dryer. But I’ll get to that in a minute. In the meantime, here is our new vent hood!

Here are some fun pics of demo of the room. We also plan to replace the super dated ceiling fixture – goodbye fluorescent light!

The room is now ready for flooring. It’s actually fairly cheap (about $1300) to rip out all of the slate and put in the LVT. I’m looking forward to seeing that next weekend when we are back up here! Notice the new huge vent pipe for the vent hood.

While we are still working on the design of the new area, we’ve got a basic idea of what we will do. Right next to the door will be a broom closet and next to that will be some shelves for laundry supplies. Here’s an inspiration picture.

To the right of those will be the washer and dryer stacked. Here’s an inspiration picture of that.

Ours will look very similar to that. Now on to the pantry. We’re still trying to decide how to design it. The dimensions are approximately 43″ wide by 40″ deep. While we could build a cabinet with drawers, a 40″ deep drawer isn’t a good idea. So we will do a “step in” pantry instead. The back shelves will be 15″ deep and the side shelves will be 10″ deep. That will leave 20″ wide by 25″ deep for a person to stand in. Here’s some inspiration for that.

Ours won’t be quite that wide or deep but it gives you an idea of what we’re thinking.

If you have any fabulous ideas for this space, please share!