Right? You’re never too old to bring laundry to your parent’s house? I hope so. Because it’s been, ohhh, about 6 weeks. Luckily my dad and Wendy are very understanding that every Monday when I drop Zoe off for the day I also being two GIANT hampers full of work clothes, every day clothes, toddler clothes, baby clothes, towels… like I said, they’re VERY understanding. We were hoping to have the laundry up and running by the end of the weekend, but Chris is working on a bathroom remodel for a client right now and he left 90% of his plumbing tools at the job, just not remembering at all about our house work this weekend. Doh! So Wendy got another load of laundry today at her house 🙂 I hope it’s the LAST one though.

Why do we have no laundry at the new house? Well, the seller’s stole the washer and dryer, but we wanted to get new ones anyway. But the bigger item is that we wanted to move them to another location in the house. The hookups were in the garage and because we really want to have the largest and most awesome workshop space, we decided to move them down to the big room. I know this might not please some people – having their washer and dryer in a living space – but this room is over 500 square feet and having in it the waaaaaay back against the wall doesn’t feel too strange for us.

When we first moved in it looked like this

We wanted that pony wall taken down, so we did this

After we moved in and got the big room painted (partially at this point) it was looking like this

Shortly after this point Chris got started moving things in order to bring the washer and dryer in here. The nice thing about where we’re moving the laundry to is that the line from the garage into the big room is super easy because it goes through the basement which means there are less walls that need to be opened up along the way. But still, obviously a giant hole needed to be opened down here in order to hook things up

First up, the water.

Originally the sink was in the corner. So the water hookups are as well. We want the sink to be on the same wall as the washer and dryer all in a line, but because the sink cabinet is going to be in the corner, leaving the lines and drain at the same spot are okay

But Chris tapped into the water line to bring water over to the perpendicular wall for the washer hookups

And you see that yellow tube? Chris also brought the gas line down over here as well for our new gas dryer

Things were looking pretty snazzy! After all the new plumbing was tended to we put up drwall

We used purple board because this will be a wet space. Then it was time for mud and tape. We don’t need it to be perfect because cabinets and the washer and dryer will be sitting in front of the wall, but we still wanted to have things taped up

You might also notice the cabinet in here now, yay! We decided to get Ikea cabinets. We didn’t want to spend a ton of money and were curious about the quality of their cabinets. The cabinets in here don’t have to be exceptional – they just need to hold the sink in place and store some shit. The two cabinets together (a 36″ sink base and an 18″ one for between the dryer and the window) were about $500. Not terrible.

Building anything from Ikea is always an adventure

I hate those stupid stick figure drawings. The nice thing is that we use their closet systems A LOT for clients and so building the kitchen cabinets was very similar and not terribly hard.

We needed to get a pretty large sink cabinet to house our AWESOME new utility sink

The top sink will be the utility sink in the garage. And the bottom one will be the utility sink in the laundry room. I normally HATE double bowl sinks 🙂 but we thought it would be good in the laundry room for pre-washing things, rinsing things off, soaking things, etc.  Why are they so dirty? Well, they’ve been sitting in the driveway for about a month, but we also bought them salvage. An experience in the rain that Zoe thought was amazing

It was POURING rain (I had Merritt in my sweatshirt tucked in with me), but Zoe thought it was just about the most awesome thing ever. She was running all over, jumping in the puddles, it was pretty adorable.

We bought the two vintage, cast iron trough sinks for $75 each. They’re very large and sturdy, so we were happy with the price. The unfortunate thing is that we aren’t super thrilled with the quality of the Ikea cabinets. I know they’re a lot better now than they used to be and that they actually get reviewed very well but customers – so we were excited to try them out and see how we liked them. But that utility sink is heavy and unfortunately we have to add some bracing to it in order for it to hold the sink. The backing is also just an incredibly thin layer of melamine. They use the same thing on their closet systems. I don’t mind that for the closet cabinets because it’s just storing clothing, but I definitely prefer a more sturdy construction for kitchen style cabinets. We’re fine with them in this space, but I wouldn’t personally use them for a kitchen.

We’ll desperately try to get the laundry up an running by the end of this coming weekend. It’ll be a bit of a challenge because I’m working the A’s Saturday and Sunday (both day games) and so Chris won’t be able to get a ton done. We’ll probably work some week day nights to be able to get it done. I know my dad and Wendy don’t mind us bringing our laundry over, but I would like to adult-it a little more and be able to do laundry at our own house where our newly purchased washer and dryer are sitting, patiently waiting to be filled with clothes to clean and dry.