Cob Jockey

Horse life may be boring right now, but home life finally isn't! And yeah this post will have nothing to do with horses, but if you like HGTV, this is for you!

The one room we didn't touch during the original renovation of our 1890 home (happy 130th birthday, house!) was the laundry room. And by that, I mean, the room that was the kitchen at the time we bought the house. We initially thought we would "deal with it" as a kitchen and renovate it later, and quickly realized 1. we couldn't deal with it, not even a little, and 2. it made a LOT more sense to do something as big as moving the location of the kitchen during the first big renovation. Couple that with the fact that we had a perfect empty room for a kitchen available, and the house didn't have a laundry room, and a plan was born.

Before and after kitchen:


The laundry room was ugly, but functional, and we hadn't figured it into the original reno costs, so we left it alone. But now we've saved enough pennies to do the laundry room and I'm over the moon. I think you can see why.

I have so rarely taken pictures of this room over the years because it's gross, but now I'm going the opposite direction and showing everyone the unvarnished truth, dog hair from under Hank's cage and all, lol.

This room was originally, in 1890, a detached kitchen, common in those days to prevent the spread of cooking fires to the big house.  Like the rest of the house, it's exterior walls are solid stone, two layers of brick with plaster on top and no air gap.  It still has the original stone threshold from those days, with a slight depression worn from 130 years of peoples' feet.

Plz ignore my cheap, temporary "we know we're renovating this room within the next two years" click lock floor and threshold

In the 1940's, they added an addition that included a hallway between the original house and originally detached kitchen, making it an attached kitchen. Just imagine this strip of Berber carpet as a strip of grass, perhaps with an overhang, and servants carrying food over the stone threshold into what is now the kitchen (which would have originally been a long, narrow dining room in 1890).

New kitchen and 1890 house to the left. Old kitchen/new laundry room and 1890 kitchen to the right. But I'm standing in a 1940 addition to take this photo. When we first saw the house, my brain could not make sense of this layout.

The original kitchen/current laundry room actually wasn't too bad looking when we bought the house.

June of 2015, this was the only place we could plug the fridge in anywhere in the house

We only did as much as we needed to to make it livable, since it did have to serve as a kitchen throughout most of 2015 when we didn't have a kitchen. We painted the cabinets, and then we replaced the linoleum with dark brown super cheap click lock flooring, which in retrospect was an awful design decision but whatever. It was temporary.



By the way, the cabinets do not have drawer slides. Sliding them is a huge pain!



Unfortunately the painted-over blue wallpaper with "milk" and "bread" logos shining through bothered me, so one day I decided I would start ripping wallpaper down and paint the walls, assuming there was a finish plaster coat underneath it like the rest of our house.

Wrong. For reference, this is plaster with a topcoat:


And this is plaster with a browncoat and no topcoat, never intended to be used without wallpaper.


And I have lived with that mistake ever since, having to stare at these ugly walls for another four years. Until now. And I am SO EXCITED TO SEE THEM GO AWAY I CAN'T EVEN STAND IT.
 
So step 1 is going to be turning this window at the back of the room into a door:

This probably looks terrifying to those of you with normal houses, but for us gross windows with old water intrusion stains are par for the course, lol.

Funny story, we poured the patio on the other side of this window two years ago, knowing that needed to be in place before the fence got put in, and we couldn't wait on the fence. So for two years, I've joked that we have Platform 9 3/4 in our backyard:

What's on the other side of that gross window

Doing the door first will give our contractor and his guys (same one we used to do the original renovation) an easy way to get stuff in and out and their own personal entrance into the house.  Partially for parrot reasons and partially for coronavirus reasons, we're gonna completely seal off the opening at the other end of the room so that no dust or germs get into the rest of the house (also there are no air intakes in here) and we can all be safe.  Of course, this does mean I'm going to spend at least a couple of months hauling my laundry into the backyard and then into the laundry room, but hey.  It'll be worth it.

My former roommate modeling the half door that leads to the rest of the house in 2015. Check out the dishwasher on the right! It was from the 60s!

Like last time, our GC will be doing the things we don't want to or can't do ourselves, like, oh, cutting a hole in my 1890 brick wall (EEP, terrifying) and figuring out what to do with the walls and ceiling. (Scrape sand and skim coat? Furring strips with drywall hung off them? I really don't care, but I also don't know what to do, these are solid brick walls so it's not like "take it down to the studs" is a thing). I'll be doing all of the finish work myself - painting, tiling the floor, tiling the backsplash, trim, building a platform for the washer and dryer, and of course, endlessly obsessing about the design.

Since I took this snapshot of my Pinterest board, some of these are winners and some of these are losers.

I'll continue to share over the next couple of months, since I know there are some people here that love this stuff. Thankfully I should be going back to the barn soon, so this blog won't ENTIRELY turn into a home improvement blog!