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One of the most used rooms in the home, especially if you have small children, is the laundry room. Most laundry rooms are in a corner of the dark basement.  Very little thought is put into them by the builder of the home probably because he has never done a load of laundry in his life. This being the case the woman of the house usually ends up doing laundry in a room that does not have a table to fold on and does not have anywhere to hang clothing taken out of the dryer.

I decided that I wanted to freshen up my laundry room and get rid of the builder’s 25 year old vinyl floor, take down the ugly, cheap brown cabinets and get rid of my laundry tub.

This should have been a really simple job but, if you have ever renovated before you will know that a renovation can grow in scope as you stand and watch it.

The first thing we had to do, of course, was clear the room. It takes time for the old vinyl floor to be ripped up and then if the subfloor is not in good shape, it has to be replaced. Next comes checking the floor to make sure it is level otherwise your tiles will crack. After that I would suggest you invest in a waterproof membrane which would stop any leakage to the floor below so that if the washing machine overflows for some reason it would not affect my basement ceiling. My laundry room happens to be on the main floor.

I wanted to get rid of my laundry tub.  It had been there for 25 years and had had numerous paint brushes washed in it so that it was stained and ugly. It seemed to be fairly simple just to move the pipes along. Wrong. To remove the tub and the pipes connected to the tub and re-route the pipes to the washer, which was only going to move along a space, was going to cost in the region of $1,000.00. This seemed to me to be an awful lot of money for a clean up job but then all renovations cost a lot of money, so I ended up compromising by changing the position of the tub and the washing machine so that at least my washer and dryer are now next to each other. Sometimes you have to change the plans if you want to save some money. Most of the time changing your mind is very costly so it is not something which you should do without a great deal of thought. In my case it was going to be cost effective to compromise.

I would love to have invested in a new front loading washer and dryer but could not justify disposing of my present machines as they are in good working order and I just  bought them prior to the new machines coming into the store. If they had been old I would most definitely have gone for the front loaders as they use less water and less energy and if you want you can put a countertop over the top of them so it looks as if your laundry room has been custom fitted and it gives you the space you need to fold things. When the big front loaders first came out there was some talk about them having a mildewed smell but I assume this problem has been taken care of. They are great if you have lots of laundry as they take bigger loads than top loaders.

I replaced my laundry tub with a really neat one which came as a cabinet with a smaller tub. The difference was quite remarkable and I now have somewhere to put my laundry products now that I no longer have my ugly wall cabinets. I do not regret removing them as the room now looks so much bigger and has a clean, fresh look about it.

With Spring coming wouldn’t it be nice to have a renovated laundry room and perhaps a drying line outside for that lovely fresh air smell.

If you have to do laundry surely you deserve a nice place to do it in.