Every year on New's Years Michael and I sit down and decide the goals for our money, home and yard. This year our focus was going to be on the driveway....getting it repaved and getting new garage doors. A few months back I thought about it and I realized that it wasn't really the most pressing issue at our house. Sure it would be great to have, but honestly the kids don't play basketball yet so the bumps in the driveway aren't really an issue. Also our garage doors are fine for a few more years...they aren't going to break apart into pieces or anything. The most pressing issue for our house was our laundry room closet in my dining room. Yes...it's in my dining room! When it comes time to do laundry I have piles of clothes...dirty clothes all over my dining room floor. Plus when we are trying to eat I have laundry washing and drying right there being all loud while we are trying to have a nice family meal. It was one of those things I had hoped we would get to, but in all honesty I figured it wouldn't get done for years and years.
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| Current laundry closet in my dining room. |
I will say the first few times I mentioned it to Michael he was not on board. The more I talked about it and explained my reasoning behind wanting the change he finally decided that it was actually the biggest need for our family right now. After all these kids clothes aren't getting smaller! Right now our dining room floor is covered with dirty laundry on laundry day so when we have teenagers it's only going to get worse!
We knew we needed to save more money so it wasn't something we could just jump into right away. Also we knew we would need the kids to be gone for the remodel, but we didn't want them to miss a ton of school. So we chose the summer time since that would give us time to save and the kids would be out of school. I asked my parents if they would keep the kids during the week of 4th of July and they said that would be fine. My dad is actually going to take the week off so he can be with the kids too. I do know they are planning to take the kids to Northwest Trek while they have them. They are going to have a blast while we are working away!
Fast forward to a little more than a month before the remodel and we've really started to get serious. I had originally drawn up the plans for what I thought we would do, but when I actually went over the plans in detail I realized that we were only going to have 9 inches of space from the front edge of the toilet to the wall. Yikes...that's not a lot of leg room. So I spent most of that day thinking and rethinking of ways we could get this to work....oh my head hurt! Thankfully when Michael came home he took over and figured out how to get everything to fit great.
We will have a total of 6 days with no kids to do this remodel. Since we'll only have a short time we decided to get done with as many things prior to the remodel date that we can. On May 25th Michael came home early from work so we could head to Lowe's and make a huge purchase! We are completely anti-credit card people when you are spending money you don't actually have. If you sign up for a Lowe's credit card you get 10% off your first purchase and 5% off for all your other purchases. Since we have the money for the remodel we didn't feel bad signing up for a credit card in order to save a lot of money. We know for a fact that we can pay the bill in full when it comes....then we will be canceling the card.
In order to make it really worth our wild we knew we needed to make one big purchase. We ended up being at the hardware store for almost 4 hours! The kids honestly did so great!
Owen loved being able to help push the carts around.
Since Owen's cart was all full Jack got to push the next one. When we would fill a cart we would park it at the front next to the contractors entrance and then get another cart to fill.
The kids were getting tired and hungry. Owen and Jack had both brought some of their spend money with them in hopes of us going to The Dollar Tree afterwards. Since it was taking so long we knew that wasn't going to happen. The candy at Lowe's isn't priced as good as The Dollar Tree so the boys had to pool their money so they could get a bag of Sour Patch Kids to share. They did so good sharing with Ella and Zeke!
In the end we had 5 very full carts. We had talked with the lady at the front about delivery when we signed up for the credit card and she said that it would cost $79....totally worth it! Well when she was ringing it up we noticed she changed the delivery fee from $79 to $20!!! She said because we just signed up for a credit card she was lowering it. She even had to get manager approval and the manager was just fine with it. We think she might have also done that because we could have literally just given them a list of what we wanted since we were choosing delivery and they would have had to go gather it. Of course we didn't do that because we wanted to pick out nice lumber and not just grab what was on top and we also wanted to be able to make sure we were getting what we really wanted. I didn't want to have to return a bunch of things.
In the end we saved almost $200 by signing up for the credit card! The delivery was scheduled for the next day in the evening. It ended up coming at 11am and since Michael wasn't there to guide the forklift driver only one of the pallets made it into the garage.
My mom and I decided to move everything we could into the garage ourselves. The only thing we weren't able to move were all the sheets of drywall....Michael and my Dad had to take care of that.
The first thing Michael wanted to build was my laundry basket cabinet. I had seen this on Pinterest and knew it would solve the problem of all our laundry being sorted all over the floor.
I wasn't really sure if I wanted the wood to be painted white or to be stained. After Michael built the benches for my dining room table and they turned out so wonderful we decided that we wanted them to be stained.
Michael bought a Kreg Jig when he was building the benches and that thing has come in so handy. It's what makes it possible for you to make pocket holes for the screws. It gives the whole project a more professional look. The picture above is of the first side.
Here is the cabinet all put together except the shelves. We joked that if Michael needed a side job he could build coffins!
Here is the finished picture I posted on FB. We originally thought that the cabinet would hold 6 laundry baskets, but we have some duct work that goes through our bathroom ceiling so that cut out some of the height that we needed. 5 baskets will be great though!
When he finished building the laundry cabinet he started on the ironing board/broom closet.
This is the inspiration picture I found on Pinterest.
Here's the framework of the cabinet. Michael honestly just designed both of these pieces himself. He did not go off plans or anything. He's so amazing!
Now of course we've had to make more trips to Lowe's...isn't that how it goes! Thankfully every time we buy something we get 5% off. One of the things I was thinking would be fun is to have is a back splash tile behind my washer and dryer. It's not going to be for a functional purpose just for visual aesthetic purposes. Now normally when I pick out something like this I almost always pick the most expensive thing, but this time I really struck gold!
I found the cheapest tiles at the store! I was so excited! We bought all 12 that they had....I think we only need 8, but it's always good to have extras.
This is the picture I found on Pinterest. I really like the chevron look, but I wasn't sure if I wanted the tile to be all one color or not.
Then I saw these beauties at that amazing price of $2.99 each! That bluish color is the color we are painting the walls and the stained wood will really bring out the bits of brown in the tile. I just love these and can't wait to see how they look in the room.
After shopping and getting the correct color of stain and more polyurethane Michael was ready to stain the cabinets.
We chose English Chestnut for the stain color. Michael and I both like dark woods with a hint of red in them. Prior to this the garage had smelled so good...all that cedar wood....after the staining started it didn't smell nearly as wonderful!
Michael has wanted some saw horses for a long time and they have come in so handy during this project. I thought it would be fun to sit Zeke up here for a photo op. Of course when I went to put my arm around him he thought I was taking him off and I ended up bumping him and he fell off. I caught him, but I'm pretty sure he's not going to want to take another saw horse ride anytime soon!
After two coats of stain and two coats of poly the cabinets are all finished. I absolutely LOVE them. They are gorgeous! There is going to be so many light colors in the bathroom/laundry room that the dark wood will really contrast nicely.
Here's the pull out drawer cabinet for my ironing board and broom. Michael got all different kinds of hooks so my ironing board can hang up and so can my broom and my mop. They all fit in there perfectly and can be stored away and be out of sight.
That's all the progress we've made so far. The big remodel will start on July 5th so stay tuned for more updates!
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