Laundry "Room" Update: Part 1

I absolutely hate doing laundry and put off doing it for slightly disturbing lengths of time.  For some reason, though, I dream of one day having a huge laundry room, full of windows letting in tons of natural light, countertops galore, and a small flat screen TV that I can watch my stories on.  Apparently I'm also 80 in my dream... However, our current situation is the complete opposite.  Our laundry "room" is a small space in the basement tucked away to the left of the stairs.  There is just enough room along the wall for the washer, dryer, and a utility sink, and just enough depth for the doors to swing open and moderate maneuverability.  I suppose if you're a realtor, you could call it "cozy" and it certainly doesn't waste any square footage.

When we moved in, it was a complete blank slate with just the utility sink and hook-ups.  The day after we moved in, we had our laundry machines delivered, as I mentioned in this post way back in November.  The space has looked the same ever since except we've painted the walls Flaming Torch and the tops of the machines are now covered in detergent bottles and dryer sheets.  Classy.  Back then, we dreamed of one day adding some shelves or cabinets, as well as a countertop.  Well, some of that dream has finally come true.

Our laundry nook, circa November 2010

Our laundry nook as of yesterday... what an improvement...

In yet another fit of us putting off our other 3,000 projects, we decided last Sunday was the perfect time to drive down to IKEA and check out their cabinet selection.  After wandering around the showrooms for a while, we finally happened upon a style we liked and headed over to the customer service station to price out a couple wall cabinets.  Happily, it was about half of what we had priced out online.  I don't know what it is about IKEA's website, but I can't figure out the cabinets for the life of me.  

We decided to go with two AKURUM cabinets with Ståt doors.  I thought the doors had a cute modern cottage look to them and once we got them home, we realized the lines in the doors nicely play off of our board and batten wall treatment.  Yay for happy accidents.  So, installation was fairly simple.  On Sunday night, we sat right down and put together the cabinets which was standard IKEA assembly.  Then we needed a hack saw to trim down the metal bracket/rail/attacher thing that attaches the cabinet to the wall, which we didn't have, so that was that for the night.

The cabinet frames.

We took the day off on Monday night to enjoy the skirt steak special at Overwood in Old Town (who could resist?), but tonight, we were back on track.  John tried sawing through the metal bracket with the saw, which made a horrible metal-on-metal noise and really didn't work at all at first.  He then tried clamping it down and switched out the blade for one with more oomph and this time, he managed to cut right through.

I told John to look victorious and this is what he came up with...

He screwed that into the wall while I stood on the other side of the wall in the cat room and made sure the screws didn't miss the studs, penetrate some electrical wiring, and shock him dead.  Once that was up, we got the cabinets up without too much problem, except when one nut was dropped and of course fell right in between our machines.

After that, we just had to pop in the hardware to attach the doors and then stick the doors onto the cabinets.  We also sprung for the additional $5 door dampers so they close smoothly and without any slamming.  Kind of like my beloved "whisper close" toilet seats.  Then it was time to install the shelves.  We bought two packs of shelves with two shelves each, but decided we only really need one shelf per cabinet at this time.  It's a little sad how excited we were that our jumbo HE Tide slides in perfectly into the cabinet.

* I apologize for the weird, dark, grainy photos.  Our basement has horrible lighting.  :(

We also bought some shiny little knobs for the cabinets, but that requires us to drill through the doors to install them, which we didn't really feel like tackling tonight.  Besides, I think it looks pretty OK without knobs, so who knows?  Maybe we'll just go knob-free.  

So, that's that.  We finally got our laundry storage tackled and ended up with way more space than we even really need at this time.  Like I mentioned, we'd still like to add a counter top for a convenient folding area and are contemplating replacing the utility sink with something more visually appealing and maybe adding a garbage disposal so we can rinse out the cats' nasty wet food dishes.  There won't be any floods of sunlight or mini TVs in my future, but who wants to spend that much time doing laundry anyways?