Freshly Laundered

Believe it or not, instead of leaping all over the house recording this renovation like I usually do (which to be honest is actually an accurate reflection of what our renovating life is like around here), I'm going to follow up yesterday's laundry post with more laundering progress, in the non-fiscal sense, of course.

Yesterday I got all excited about our lovely new tiled floor.

But let's face it. The laundry didn't look much like a laundry.

I've been auditioning for the role of laundry cabinet for months, hoping to find a nice-looking freestanding buffet that we could slap a couple of coats of paint on and pop a sink in.

But they either needed way too much work...

Or were too shallow to fit a sink.

Enter this guy.

That guy is the second set of secondhand kitchen cabinets that I found on Gumtree and decided to snap up to use in our downstairs kitchen.

But there wasn't room for all of the cabinets in the downstairs kitchen. These guys didn't get a look in at all.

So, I found a perfect new home for them in the upstairs laundry!

Our carpenters built the little sink cabinet a new base to sit on...

Which fitted around the waste plumbing nicely.

And then Mr Cabinet got popped into place on top.

So that the door on the right could open properly without hitting the door frame, they popped some spacers in between the cabinet and the wall.

 

The rest of the wall cabinets then followed...

And voila, like magic, we had a room that suddenly looks like a laundry!

But I'm not done yet.

When I visited IKEA searching for downstairs kitchen benchtop options, I snapped up a plain white pre-made laminate PRÄGEL benchtop for a grand total of $105 that just needed a little bit of trimming on the sides to slot in over the top of the sink cabinet and span the length of that wall. It took a bit of squishing (and a bit of scraping of our freshly painted walls), but it does the job beautifully.

Then it was time to cut a hole for the sink. I must say, I was pretty anxious about that step. My beautiful new pristine white benchtop!!!!

But with the sink slotted into place, all was well again.

Unfortunately, when the plumber and I consulted over where to place the taps for the sink, we didn't take into account the fact that we'd need the spacer between the cabinet and the wall to allow for the doors opening without hitting the door frame, so the centre of the cabinet doors doesn't line up with the tap and sink perfectly, as it should have. Sigh.

But never mind. I'm sure it's one of those things that you only notice when you're looking for it. Right? Well I'll keep telling myself that, anyway.

In the meantime, how pretty is my laundry??

Still not quite done. The next step was for the plumber to come back to put the taps on and fit the waste plumbing to the sink. Excuse the mess.

So now we have a sink that works, and a proper place for the washing machine to hook up!

Except that all of you super observant readers will surely have noticed that our existing top-loading washing machine would have struggled to slot under our new benchtop, as demonstrated by this photo from earlier.

So, in a move I've been awaiting for a very long time, we bought a new washing machine!

Well actually, we managed to get it secondhand for a very nice price, but it works perfectly fine and looks just lovely sitting there under the bench. With room next door for a dryer when the time comes. I've never owned a dryer before in my life. I'll hardly know myself!

So what do you think of our laundry? Better than this?

And this?