That one time we made a laundry room...

When we were looking at houses last year, one of the things that Josh and I both agreed we really needed to have in a new house was a laundry room.  The first two houses that we put offers on both had huge, awesome laundry/utility rooms (I'm not dwelling on those anymore, I'm just sayin').  This house, the house we ended up buying and now inhabit, did not have a laundry room.  But structurally, the house was well-suited for some renovation that would allow for the construction of a laundry room.  Plus, Josh would get to tear out a wall and use his demolition skills.  So, hey, what the hell.  Let's build us a laundry room!

This is what the "laundry area" of the house looked like originally:

Basically, there was a small, inset section of wall between the kitchen and the bathroom where the tall, upright water heater and a stacked washer/dryer unit lived (the washer/dryer were no longer in existence when we purchased the house).  And like everything else, it was pink.  And carpeted.

I made a schematic so that this upcoming description won't be too confusing:

First of all, we have a massively huge bathroom in the middle of our house.  This room used to be a bedroom, and at some point somebody decided to make themselves a giant bathroom with two entrances and a walk-in closet.  It's cool to have such a large bathroom, but it's a little odd.  And most importantly, we did not need a large walk-in closet in our bathroom.  We decided to remove the wall of the closet that once created the "laundry nook" (it's the purple wall in my handy little drawing) in the hallway between the bathroom and the kitchen, thus creating an open space that we could use as a laundry room.  We also sealed off the closet door into the bathroom (shown with green dots).

I wrote a post a while back about Josh's demolition skills, and this room really put those skills to the test.  First he tore down the wall to create the open space we needed.  After we had removed the old water heater, Josh noticed that there was a little bit of water damage to some of the floor boards underneath, so he had to cut a chunk of the floor out and replace a number of boards.  This actually proved to be convenient, because we also needed to reroute all of the pipes for the water and gas lines to the back of the new room we'd created in order to hook up the washer, dryer, and new water heater.  So, Josh spent many days under the house, climbing in and out of the giant gaping hole in our floor.  And then he patched the floor!  And then we patched the walls!  And then it was starting to look like a real room!

We decided to install a tankless water heater in place of the old, standard one.  This is great because it's way smaller and we were able to hang it on the wall above the washer, and it's really efficient.  The down side to reorganizing this room and installing a new kind of water heater was that Josh needed to cut new vent holes through the roof of the house, which was a bit of an ordeal.  This ultimately resulted in us having to strip and re-seal the entire roof, but that's a story for another day.  The bottom line is that he did in fact cut holes through the roof of the house, and we now have a nicely-vented water heater as well as a light/fan combo to help ventilate the room.

After we had finished patching up the walls and ceiling, we tiled this room the same pattern as the kitchen and the bathroom on either side of it (these three rooms were all tiled at the same time).  I chose to paint this room a bright golden color because there are no windows nearby and I wanted to be sure that it didn't just feel like a dark closet all of the time.  I like the yellow quite a bit, and it looks really nice when you see the blue kitchen cabinets in the background as well.  I found a good deal on a front loader washer/dryer set on Craig's List, and after a fair bit of spillage we finally managed to get everything connected and in proper functional order.  We turned on the newly-rerouted water and gas pipes, and nothing exploded!

Finally, I bought these cool shelf brackets online and used some of the old boards we salvaged from the office demolition to make some shelves for the wall.  I'm still debating putting more shelves on the opposite side of the room, but haven't decided yet.

We still have a little bit of cleaning up around the edges to do in here, but overall it's in good shape.  I mean, this room didn't even exist before- we made it!  So, finally, your before and after shots: