Pantry + laundry room

Pantry + laundry room

If you follow us on facebook (you should!), you might have seen our big news on Monday that we signed a contract to have our laundry moved from the basement to the pantry, YAY!

We have a VERY scary basement, which I guess makes sense for a house built in 1890, but in the last year it seems like it’s somehow gotten even scarier and ickier than it ever was before, probably because all the construction around the house caused a lot of dirt and dust and random construction junk to collect down there. Plus, spiders.

And this is the place where I’m supposed to think my clothes are coming clean?

This is the view up the stairs.  Eek!

We told you a couple of months ago that we wanted to wait a year or two before maybe moving our laundry. Well, things change. After that electrical debacle in the pantry a couple of weeks ago, we started to think, well we’re going to have to get an electrician out here anyway… and there’s probably no point in starting the pantry storage project if it’s all going to change when we move the laundry… so maybe we should just see if this whole laundry thing is really possible and how much it would cost and maybe possibly we could just go ahead and do it sooner than later… We got a quote that wasn’t as bad as we expected, and they’re starting NEXT WEEK!

I think we were sold on the house the first time we saw the pantry. It’s about 4-1/2 feet wide by 12 feet long, so there’s tons of space for storage. When we had to replace the kitchen floor, we had them extend the oak into the pantry as well, for a seamless look, and we’ve been planning on using the same paint colors in there.

In case you are curious about the layout, you can see the doorway to the pantry on the right in this picture below:

Here you can see what the pantry looked like on demolition day back in October:

The plan is to put the washer and dryer next to each other along the back wall, if possible. There should be room, but if not, we can stack them if we have to. Either way it means having to remove the old door you can see in the picture above and putting up drywall. For some reason our house has two exterior doors just a few feet from each other, and the one in the pantry has been boarded up and unusable for a long time. We’re going to keep the actual door, and you may remember from our to-do list for 2014 that we want to see if we can use that old door to replace the current one in the kitchen. It’s in bad shape now but it could be so pretty.

Our original plan for the pantry was to buy several Ikea Billy bookcases to fill the entire left-side wall, where those white cubbies were before. We still want to do something like this, so we’ll wait to see how much room we have after the washer and dryer are installed. I think we should still have room for at least two bookcases, and we can always build up higher if we need/want more storage.

We also want to turn the right side of the room (where you see the old wood cabinet in the photo above) into our “mud room” — more like a “mud corner.” This space is just around the corner from our back door, so it would be a convenient place to hang coats and drop boots. I think this pantry/laundry/mud room is going to be so great, functional and hopefully pretty darn cute when it’s done!

Of course we’ll keep you updated on the progress as we go. For now we’re just SO excited (and of course a little nervous because you just never know what will happen when you do anything in an old house). But you know what? We may never have to go in the scary basement again!!

(P.S. Have you weighed in on our bathroom paint color debate happening on facebook and instagram right now? Let us know what you think!!)