Laundry Room Redo #1

So like I said, my laundry room needs a redo from the old 1970's decor. It has to be on a budget, so it's really DIY.

The room is a weird, sort of triangle shape because my house is sort of an arc shape and the laundry room is positioned at the transition or bend in the house. When we remodeled the house, the laundry room had a window to the outside "breezeway" to the garage. When we enclosed the breezeway, which we still call a breezeway, we made a doorway between the laundry room and breezeway. When we did that, we had to move the dryer to the wall opposite of the washer.

So, here's what it has looked like for the past 16 years, sorta unfinished. I don't think I even painted the door frame and there's some missing baseboard.

The dryer side, clothes rod above it is too high for me to reach comfortably, but also the clothes hang down in the way of the dryer. So I'll put a pull down rod above there so the clothes can be up out of the way, but the rod still accessible to me.

The room looks kind of big in the pictures, but it's really not. It's a fairly small space, but has lots of built in cabinets, which is nice. They're stuffed, so part of my task is to clear out of lot of things and paint the insides and outsides of the cabinets.

The dryer side from another angle. See, the room is so small, it's hard to get a picture of the whole thing in one shot.

And this shelf, oh my goodness, the things that accumulate on an open shelving unit over the years. Ugh. "I'll put this here for now," really means forever. I found a new home for this shelving unit in the garage. And the room already looks so much better without it.

Eek! Sixteen years of accumulated dirt and dust. I'm embarrassed. And the 50 year old cracked linoleum has to go.

After clearing out the room (except washer and dryer because the room still has to function during this redo), the first order of business was to scrape the popcorn off the ceiling. It wasn't nearly as hard as I thought it was going to be. It only took me a couple of hours.

Today's task was pulling up the linoleum. I've read that I need a heat gun to scrape up the glue layer. I don't have a heat gun, but will be getting one ASAP.

I'm Back!

 Whew. It's been a long haul. I exhausted myself with all the BOP, DOJ fighting.

Suffice it to say that husband is home. He was released from the halfway house in July of 2022 and has one more year of supervised release. And we're STILL in the midst of the legal battle. Our case went all the way to the Supreme Court. They declined to hear it, which was no surprise. So now we have a Habeas Corpus in the works. And we're waiting on a ruling from that.

For now, he has to work full time, so the farm is suffering from his lack of availability. I do what I can. Mowing seems to be my life right now. The hay fields have been reclaimed by the weeds, so we aren't getting much hay, even if he did have time to cut, rake, and bale. But the fields still have to be mowed. So I've been doing that with my riding mower.

I'm not milking goats this year. We're still raising them, but have cut back on the number of goats we have. Husband and I don't use a lot of milk these days, so there's really no need for me to store milk for the year. Plus, it really hurts my hands. I need a young'un to take over milking duties. We do still slaughter the meat goats, though. We had six this year, so the freezer is stocked.

I didn't put in a garden this year either. I intended to, but the weather didn't cooperate and I was just so busy. So, I'm glad I didn't because there is too much work on the farm for me to add to it.

BUT, I've started a new decorating project that I'm pretty excited about - the laundry room. It's been a long time coming. When we moved to the farm, we remodeled most of the house, but not the laundry room. It still has the original 70's linoleum and popcorn ceiling. I need a creative outlet. All work and no play makes me a dull bird. So, although, this project IS a lot of work, my mind's eye is on the finished product, which gives me joy and satisfaction. I have to do it as cost effectively as I can since we're still under the government's thumb and still have legal bills. So I'm DIYing it as much as possible. I think I'll be able to do everything except the floor. I want to have brick pavers, but I'll have to wait an undetermined amount of time for the floor since it's a big expense.

More to come on this project.