New Year, New Project!

We decided to start off the New Year at "Our House" right by starting and finishing another big project! We haven't really done a big project (like an entire room) in a long time, so it was really fun and felt really good to finish up a whole room. The Laundry Room! This is one of my favorite rooms in the house, not because I love doing laundry, but because it seems like most houses don't have a laundry room, and ours is also our second bathroom, and it's BIG. When we were looking at houses we really wanted two bathrooms, or as I kept saying, at least two toilets. So we were very happy when the house we got had a 3/4 bathroom for the second bathroom. It's great because our guest rooms are downstairs so our guests can have their very own bathroom!

This room also had some really great things about it to start with, the floors are excellent tile, the corner shower is tiled to the ceiling, and the vanity is one with a solid sink and counter top, the toilet is also fairly new, at least compared to the one in the main bathroom.

When we were inspecting the house we discovered that this toilet had been disconnected, a plumber had to fix it for us before we purchased the house, but apparently he did not feel that it was necessary to fix the dry-wall that he cut out (I don't know who this guy was but we did get a good deal, which is probably why he didn't fix the wall).

This is a before picture with the shower and toilet in it, it's hard to tell but the previous owners had repainted (mostly) this room, and when they did they also painted all of the top tile in the shower.

Here you can see why I say they mostly repainted, note that the wall to the right of the window is a tan color while the wall to the left is white.
Here is the first "after" picture! We repainted the walls the same tan that we have in the main part of the house, since we had a couple gallons left over. We scraped all the paint off of the tile in the shower as well as scraped a bunch of build up off of the bottom of the shower. Bryce put in a new brushed nickel towel bar and patched up the holes from the old towel bar.
Over here by the washer you can see where the utility sink was removed, there is rust on the wall as well as a white spot where the wall was not repainted.
Here it is all painted and fresh! Bryce also replaced the outlets and light switches to match the rest of the house and bought the cool rolling cart that is in between the washer and dryer to store all the laundry essentials.
This is a before picture, note the weird placement of the towel ring and the UGLY light fixture over the mirror (which we obviously don't use because there are no light bulbs...)
Ta-Da! A beautiful new light fixture (same as the one in the master bedroom) and a new pretty mirror (the other mirror is kinda cool but does not go with this room at all). We also got a new towel ring and moved it to a better place. Note the new outlets and light switches! This outlet badly needed replaced, I plug the vacuum in here when I do the stairs and it was so bad that the plug would keep falling out while trying to vacuum.
I have been watching HGTV a lot lately, and I am always curious how much a "remodel" costs. So for the first time I kept track and I'm going to tell you (approximately) what we spent to upgrade our laundry room.

Paint: Nothing because we used left overs, but if we had to buy new, a gallon of ceiling paint and a gallon of the tan would be about $30 a piece=$60

New Light Fixture: $25 for fixture, $6 per hurricane=$43

New towel bars: $35

Rolling laundry cart: $30

Mirror: $25

New outlets and switches: $15

Of course since we are constantly doing projects around the house we already had things like paint rollers, brushes, and trays, as well as everything to do the dry-wall. So if you were starting from nothing the cost would be a bit higher, but our total cost for this project was:

$148 (not counting the paint).

We also have our eye on a new brushed nickel faucet to replace the one in the sink, this one sprays all over and does not have a stopper, but they were out at Lowe's last night because it's only $34 and apparently everybody is loving that great deal. So if they get a new stock of them soon we will be replacing the faucet as well.

Bathrooms are often the most expensive of remodels, of course we did not have to replace any sinks, toilets, showers, or floors, which is probably the most expensive part of a remodel. Although laundry is not my favorite chore, going into this nice fresh laundry room makes the trip down the stairs much more pleasant!