So fresh and so clean

The first thing we tackled on the house was the struggling laundry room area. The laundry area is located in the garage, and was separated from the storage/car parking area of the garage by a thin divider wall that fell about a foot short from the ceiling. Here it is as we saw it when we first walked through the house:

Take a look at the struggling ceiling tiles and the popcorn ceiling under that.

 The paneling on the wall both in the laundry room and on the divider wall was rotted at the bottom and curling away from the wall, the pipes to connect to the washer/dryer were rusted, busted and leaking, and there was dryer lint, dirt and cobwebs EVERYWHERE.

This is after using a commercial vac to get up most of the dryer lint...

 Moving further into the laundry "room", there was a grimy outdoor sink and a wooden cabinet full of cobwebs and an old birds nest. The naked dirty hot water heater pipe and unfinished window completed the look:

 

The first thing we did (after my dad fixing all the pipes) was tear down all the ceiling tiles and scrape off the popcorn ceiling throughout the whole garage to get down to the raw plywood underneath. The ceiling tiles didn't take long but scraping the popcorn took hours. We also scraped up the patchy linoleum tile. Then we tore down the wimpy divider wall and all the paneling and used a commercial vac to vacuum up all the dirt, lint, and nastiness that had accumulated (including tons of acorns in the wall...some squirrel family might return this winter to find their whole life savings gone).

Then my dad and Nick got to work on rebuilding the wall:

Nick's first experience drilling

This has been the dirtiest work so far

After we got the bones of the wall up we put in beadboard in the laundry room and faux-wood paneling on the garage-side of our new wall. We did the faux-wood for two reasons: 1) it's a lot cheaper and easier than putting up a drywall wall, and 2) the rest of the garage is already paneled with faux-wood paneling and it's in good enough shape to not have to replace.

We'll paint this and the rest of the garage so the walls will match

We put in a light and painted the plywood ceiling (4 coats!):

My dad had to update the plug for the washer and install a vent for the dryer. He also added a heating/AC vent to make it more room-like. Then we added molding and baseboards, added molding around the window, painted the floor with an epoxy-coated floorpaint, painted the walls, and added a door:

I wanted to have a purple room somewhere in the house :)

Finally, we added the whole reason for the room: our washer and dryer (a Craigslist find!). We also added a few stand-alone cabinets we found on clearance at Home Depot for storage. Oh, and we cleaned up the grimy sink and put that back in, which is super useful for cleaning out paint brushes, etc.

So there you have it! Our first house transformation. We took a disgusting 'nook' and turned it into a super useful laundry room. We still need to add some hooks for hanging clothes but we're incredibly pleased with how it turned out and are so thankful to my dad for providing expertise and helping us make it happen!