When we bought this house, I had grand ideas of renovating the living room, putting in a new kitchen, sprucing up the bathroom! Never in my wildest dreams did I think we would be starting with the laundry.
The laundry: a room for the sole purpose of doing chores.
Nothing good ever happened in the laundry. No beautiful meals or relaxing baths. No breakfasts in bed or Christmas mornings.
Nope. Laundries are where you clean poo off clothes (for clarification, I’m talking about baby poo), pour dirty mop bucket water down the drain and have a permanent weird gunk at the bottom of the sink. Laundries are sad, sad little places.
Ours was heinous. It stunk. It had been totally unloved. So much so, that a few months after we moved in, we noticed that the walls were soaking wet and found that there was a leak inside the wall.
So, to fix the leak, we had to rip open the wall. Opening the wall meant we had to insulate and line the weather board and hang new GIB. Exposing the frame of the house revealed rotten timber, including the floor joists.
Ergo… A new laundry.
With the exception of the structural elements, which we left to the professionals, Shane and I tackled this job by ourselves. We’d never hung GIB, plastered, plumbed or installed flooring before. YouTube became our mentor as well bumbled our way through it.
The good thing about doing a laundry as our first reno is that you can make mistakes and it doesn’t matter as much as it would have in the kitchen or bathroom.
Working in weekends and the odd night after dinner, it took us 6 months to put the final touches on this room. We realised that our concept of time and budget was completely unrealistic and that our daughter, who was one at the time, was our biggest obstacle in getting jobs done.
Half way through the project, I thought Shane and I would be getting a divorce. We agreed on nothing and we didn’t trust each other to do the job right. Trying to manage this project, with a one year old and working fulltime crushed our marriage. When we finished it, we decided we needed a break from renovated to get our lives back on track. It didn’t bode well for the rest of the house…
A year later, this laundry is pretty awesome. It’s become a bit of a dumping ground for tools and stuff we’re trying to sell because it’s out of sight. It’s just been nice to have one room completely done.
Having said that, my biggest regret with this project is that we didn’t get the custom made cupboards and benchtop I wanted. When we got the quote, it came in just a little over 3k, which I thought was way too much. In the end, we bought kitset cupboards and a bench which came in close to 2k, but we weren’t able to get the right layout. Now, it’s not as functional as it could have been. I wish we’d just paid the extra thousand and got it right (and installed for us!)
So, the thing I learnt from this reno: sometimes it’s worth it to pay a little bit extra to get it exactly right.
Laundry cost: $4500 (including structural repairs)
Cupboards, flooring, sink & mixer, plumbing fittings – Bunnings
Benchtop – O’Brian Group, Mosgiel
A Little Family Reno 