New laundry room

At long last our new laundry room is completed. Some of you might remember from last summer that I told you how we had a leak in the cellar. It turned out to be worse than expected, and the repair process went on for months with large fans drying the room, the floor which had to be broken up for a new drain to be installed, the stopcock which had to be replaced and a lot of other stuff that I'd rather forget. As you can imagine, it ended up costing quite a bit. It stings having to dish out more than 30,000 kroner (3,000 GBP) in unforeseen expenses, just to pay the plumber. When the time finally came to furnish the room, there was not much money left. It was enough for a trip to IKEA, and then we did what we could to find inexpensive solutions and salvage old stuff.

The result is, as you can see, not a super-modern, streamlined laundry room, but a bright and pleasant room where it's nice to work. It's quite an improvement from the old, dingy room with its dark pine walls and red-painted mouldings. (Which you can see here.)

It was a challenge to find good solutions in such a small room with three doors, but at last we have enough storage space. We even managed to squeeze a small cupboard in between the washing machine and the hot water tank. There is no space for the tumble dryer here, but there is space for it in the next room.

 Don’t worry - the walls are not lopsided. :-) It's just Hubby that has played with his camera again.

One can fit a lot into a typical 80 centimeter wide kitchen cabinet from IKEA.

This is my favourite part of the room. In this little nook there was room for some narrow shelves, which Hubby made from planks. Here we have space for the detergents and such, and it's incredibly practical and handy.

The old zinc boxes have in their time been used for storing glass photographic plates. Now they have been given new life here.

Like most other ladies in Bloglandia, I also have Durance products in the laundry room (they are irresistible, aren’t they?). I do not use laundry detergents from Durance though, because I think that conventional detergents do a better job, but I buy bottles of Durance hand soap, which I pour over into soap dispensers.

A good hand cream is important to have readily available for use after you have washed and scrubbed. Especially now in winter, when it's so easy to get dry hands.

I decorated the shelves with lace. A small leftover turned the piggy bank into a French maid. Having a piggy bank in the laundry room is actually a useful tip. All the pennies that are found in trouser pockets end up here.

An old jam jar does the job as a container for stain remover. The two metal boxes with washing powder have stickers with Whites and Coloureds. I had to cut a little off the stickers to make them fit, but it does not look too bad, I feel.

To make the most of space above the washing machine and the hot water tank, we cut some MDF to appropriate lengths and painted them white. Then I bought baskets to fit. They were a bargain at half price. Hubby was so frustrated because he could never remember what was inside them, so I bought some small zinc plates and wrote on them what the baskets contain.

Over the sink we installed a rail so clothes can hang to drip dry.

We chose to keep the old ceiling lamp. Now that the room is painted in bright colours, it actually offers ample light. Also, I think that it looks quite nice too.

The same rail from the IKEA Bygel line was also mounted on the wall.

We also bought a Grundtal drying rack to mount behind one of the doors. It can be folded against the wall when not in use, so it doesn’t get in the way of the door.

The large drying rack has been placed on hooks behind another door where it is out of the way when not in use. We also mounted a row of pegs. Here you can see my old-fashioned feather duster. I discovered some years ago that it is incredibly handy to use for ornaments and narrow shelves.

Some hotels are courteous enough to provide their guests with proper laundry bags. They are very handy when travelling. The fabric breathes, so it is much better than storing laundry in plastic bags. I also use them when I’m going to the swimming pool.

I use a large wicker basket for the laundry. It holds a lot and is comfortable to carry. Actually, I think it’s intended for use in the garden, but never mind that.

The enamel soap dish that I got for Christmas hangs by the sink. It is so incredibly lovely! I also got some lavender soaps with bits of dried flowers in them, so now the room smells of lavender.

Crafts are not my forte, but I like to have something to keep myself busy with, so I knit cloths from cotton. They are much better than the ordinary cloths you buy in the shop. I crocheted the towel a few years ago. It has been tucked away in a drawer, but I thought it fit in here.

The towel is hanging on this cool hook that I found in the back of a closet in the cellar. I thought it deserved better, so I put it here. In the same closet, I found several other nice hooks that I now use to hang mops and brushes on.

Hubby almost fainted when he found out I wanted to buy old fashioned clothes pegs for forty kroner (4 GBP) for a set of five, and regaled me with stories about how little they cost in his childhood when the gypsies travelled around and sold such things for next to nothing. That didn’t help me much, for we don’t have any peg whittling gypsies that come knocking on our door around here. But a phone call to England solved the problem. My in-laws are visiting at the moment and they brought along a lot of "dollypegs" as they call them. Just think, in England they only cost 90 pence for a pack of ten. I got four packs, so now I have plenty.

The small zinc tub is actually a herb pot, where you can write on the board what kind of herbs you are growing, but I think it is much more appropriate for keeping clothes pegs in. Incidentally, it comes from England too.

The wall clock was also bought in England for a fiver, when we visited a market in North Shields in the autumn. I think it is very sweet. The old-fashioned zinc lamp was a Christmas present from a friend some years ago.

I won the heart at a blog giveaway a while back. It is beautiful, but I have been struggling to find the right place to hang it. Finally it ended up on the wall here, where I can see and enjoy it every day. It matches the room’s colour nicely, and you have to try and make a room look pretty, even if it's just a laundry room, right? Perhaps it is even more important to decorate a utility room so that you can feel good about working there.

I had two old frames lying around and thought they could be used here, so I searched the net for some appropriate pictures. These two fit the bill perfectly!

 Now, it's not as though washing has become my favourite pastime since we finished the laundry room, but compared to previously, it's good, clean fun (pun intended).

EEEEEK!

Sometimes a little hysteria is not out of place, I think. I must admit I felt that a shriek would be a fitting reaction when we found this little bugger hopping around in the laundry room.

However, I constrained myself.

You see, this happened just as we had a visitor and were showing our guest around the house: “And this is our laundry room. We’re redecorating due to water damage, so it’s a bit chaotic, as you can see… What the HELL???!!!” A fat warty toad, scared by the sudden light, bounced off and landed with a noisy splash in the open drain.

We just stood there, the three of us, staring dumbfounded at the toad, our guest looking a bit discomforted. Not that I blame her. It’s not like it’s easy to find something nice to say in situations like this. “So, you’ve got a few things to grapple with, I see,” she finally ventured.

“Eh, yeah, you could put it that way”, said Hubby, who was thinking exactly the same as me: “Aha!”

This would explain why, a few days previously, a frog turned up in Hubby’s boot. When we were over in Skien last weekend to help my mother in the garden, there was a bit of commotion when Hubby put his boots on and found something large and alive in one of them. Out fell a very dry and shell-shocked frog that had obviously travelled across the mountains with us. We couldn’t understand how on earth it had ended up there. Yes, there seems to be plenty of hopping and bouncing going on out in the garden, but the boots had been inside in the laundry room all the time.

When I saw the connection I felt my skin crawl. The thought that there might be dozens of disgusting warty animals lurking around the house made me panic slightly. Fortunately I didn’t find any, despite a discreet but intense search behind sofas and under beds. (You can imagine what it feels like to show off your house whilst scanning the floor for amphibians.)

Anyway, the toad was immediately evicted and was thrown without mercy as far as we could out into the forest, where it can look for some other shelter for the winter. Then we covered up the drain very carefully until the plumber could come.

That blasted drain has been the cause of a lot of problems recently. We were supposed to get a new floor laid some weeks ago, but when the man came, he took one look at the drain and declared that this was utterly useless. It wasn’t possible to make the floor watertight with a drain like that.

We have to admit we doubted that ourselves when we saw the condition of the drain, so when the plumber came and said he had to break up the cement floor, we weren’t all that surprised.

THE NEW DRAIN over the sewage pipe and the newly leaking main water supply. 

It was finally done on Tuesday. Then the new cement had to dry for a few days before the floor layer could come again. But as you know, if it isn’t one thing then it’s another. He came yesterday and hummed and ha’d and complained about having too much to do since everybody else in his firm was away on holiday. Besides, this wasn’t as easy as all that. He thought the floor ought to be sanded, but since the stupid plumbers had done something he wasn’t happy with, he thought he would have to plaster instead. What’s more, he couldn’t figure out how to get under and around the main water supply pipe. We might have to box that in. In pure frustration he shook the pipe a little too roughly with the result that it started leaking slightly.

So here we go again. This could take time.

Today we have waited in vain for any workers to show up, but nobody came. We’re hoping they’ll come next week.

I thought the plumber was joking when he said the room would be finished “sometime before Christmas”. Now I’m not so sure....

FRESHLY PAINTED. Now we're just waiting for the new floor.

 PAINTING. The colour of the walls is called Cappucino. It is just the right shade of pale beige, I think. The mouldings are white gloss paint.

 VERY HAPPY WITH THIS ONE. The old door with the horrid red mouldings was as good as new after a few coats of white.

 SHELVING. In this nook we will put up shelves for soaps and detergents and such. 

We wish everybody a nice weekend. 

It is still possible to vote for us in Petunia's photo competition. Please go HERE and vote!
Hubby has numbers 81 and 84. 
Husfruen has numbers 73 and 75.
84 is my favourite.Thanks for your support. :-) 

Not pining for pine

As we have told you before, we had a water leak in the laundry room some weeks ago. The dehumidifier and the fan have been going around the clock, and finally it was dry enough to start painting.
Apparently, even old pine panelling can bleed resin from the knots and make brown stains on the paint, so we got a primer that is also supposed to act as a sealant.  Let's hope it works.
Here is the work in full swing.

PRIMING. We will definitely not miss the old brown knotty pine. It is amazing how much light it steals.

DIFFICULT JOB. It's not exactly easy to work around all the wires and pipes. 

A TEMPORARY SOLUTION. Luckily the plumber was able to hook up the new hot water tank. It would have been so inconvenient to be without hot water for weeks. Especially now, when we have so many guests visiting for their holidays. 

Notice the bright red window sill. All the skirting boards and mouldings in the room were a jolly red colour. Stylish? Nei, njet no and nein. All the doors and window sills will be lovely and white, while the walls will be painted a soft beige colour. 

We have done a bit more painting today. Things are starting to look good. Next week sometime we'll get the new floor in. We're really looking forward to that. 

Laundry room laments

We had a nasty surprise when we entered the cellar yesterday. In the laundry room there was red rusty water flowing from the hot water tank on to the floor. The floor covering felt squishy under our feet and there was a faint smell, which we didn’t like very much.

We felt it was best to call someone in to assess the damage. A man came this morning and quickly confirmed our suspicions of a leak in the tank, but worse than that, he concluded that it had been going on for a quite a while.

So, out went the dodgy old water tank and off came the floor covering, only to reveal a soaking wet cement floor covered in a slimy substance I’d rather not describe in detail, except to say it was not a sight for the squeamish.

I believe you can imagine our first thought: My God, how much is this going to cost?

Luckily, we were able to breath a sigh of relief a little later, when we found out that some of it is going to be covered by our house insurance. We still have to shell out quite a bit, but it won’t break the bank.

THE PROBLEM. If you open your hot water tank and it looks like this, then you know you're in trouble.

Certainly, the laundry room was on our long list of things to fix up, but there was quite a few things I’d rather have had done first. Now, it seems, our priorities have been changed for us. So, I suppose there’s nothing else to do but look on the bright side and try and think how we would like to organise things down there.

First of all we would like to paint the tatty old pine panel white. Then we want to install some cupboards. As it is, there is absolutely nowhere to stash things. However, we will have to wait until everything is dry before we can do anything at all. There is a huge fan and a dehumidifier working round the clock there now, so hopefully in a few days things will look better.

The plumber who came round in the afternoon was a highly efficient character, and before we could say “cold shower” he had rigged up a brand new hot water tank in an adjacent room, so we can’t complain of being much inconvenienced really.

KNUT IS ON THE JOB. The dehumidifier will have to work around the clock for some days to come.

Now the question is: Is there any way to make a laundry room seem inviting and stylish? Not like the sort of room that one would want to hang out in, but somewhere nice to work.

If you have got any advice, it would be most welcome.