Laundry Room Redo

In a burst of motivation, I decided to tackle the laundry room.  This involved scraping the ceiling, painting the ceiling and walls, replacing the light fixture and the outlets and switches.  I had a couple full days to work on it plus an extra evening.

While my laundry was in progress, I first disconnected the utility sink and removed it from the wall.  Behind it was more proof that the house has only ever been yellow.  Also, proof that the paint was the last thing to happen to the house.  I am somewhat amazed that the painting was done with all the fixtures and panels mounted on the wall.  That’s a lot of things to protect from paint.  but anyway, I think I’m doing things the right way by removing everything from the wall before painting.

After the sink was gone, the wire shelf was taken down and all the holes patched.  Eventually, I will be installing cabinets.  That may not happen for a little while, but it should be soon.

As my laundry was completed, I moved out the washer, then the dryer from the room.  Then I shut off the power and took the ceiling light down.  As I’ve mentioned before, the fluorescent light had a failing ballast, so it was dim, dim, dim.  I took a reading of the light output and got:

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Pretty poor.  I wasn’t entirely sure how quickly I would get through this project, so I jumped online and ordered the ceiling light – a Pixi flatlight.  I also made a quick order for the Adorne switches, plates and outlets for the room.  I didn’t think I’d need the light for a while, so I ordered it with standard shipping, giving me almost a week to finish up.

This is what I started with:

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The ceiling work went much better than expected.  I adjusted the garden spray and got much more water up there, which helped a lot in getting the popcorn down.  I also spent extra time scraping to reduce the amount of sanding.  Finally, I used a courser grit sandpaper to get the remaining bits off.

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Priming was uneventful and worked well.  Priming the walls was pretty ok.  It wasn’t a full coverup of the yellow underneath, but it would be good enough for the paint+primer I had planned.

While that was drying, I headed out to Lowes and got the paint for the walls.  The paint was a very, very light yellow called Crisp Linen.  In hindsight, I was probably attracted by the name more than the color.  I did a quick cut-in with the paint and decided to take a break because annoyance was setting in.  I’m learning what my limits are.

Suddenly, the USPS delivers a package.  It’s my ceiling light.  It showed up four days early.  So I took the time to install it – poorly at first, then better the second time.  Still not as good as it should be, but that will be the third time.  The light output is pretty amazing.  Look at the difference:

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1200 lux vs. 110 lux!  One of the things the new light did was expose what a poor color choice I had made.

All of the areas where I cut in looked terrible.  It’s a good thing I didn’t go any further with my painting.  Valspar has a guarantee that if you don’t love the color you picked, you can exchange it for another.  So I took the paint back to Lowes and said, “I hear Valspar has a ‘love your color or we’ll replace it’ guarantee.”  The cashier says, “Oh, we’ll take it back.” and without any explanation needed, I got the paint credited back to my credit card.

I purchased a new color, Sherwin Williams “Cay”, and immediately got it on the walls.  It covered extremely well.  While it was drying, it looked streaky as hell, but it dried solid and was a much more pleasing color then the urine yellow I had started with.

I reinstalled the slop sink and put new outlet covers in where I wasn’t going to update to Adorne.  I had purchased nice heavy-duty metal outlet frames and if I wasn’t going with Adorne, I would say these outlet covers look damn sharp against the blue.  I also secured the 220 outlet, which had seemingly stripped the screws holding it in.  Now the outlet is fully flush with the wall.

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I then returned the washer and dryer to the room.  One issue I have with the dryer is the exhaust vent tubing.  You can see the exhaust port in the first above photo.  I have no idea why the original builder installed a 5” vent port.  A while ago, I fashioned a reducer that would fit inside the vent to provide me a standard 4” port.  While I’m putting the dryer back, I am also changing the venting from the dryer to semi-rigid.  The gist of this problem is the tubing and the vent port force the dryer away from the wall by a significant distance.  To be fair, the non-rigid tubing I was using before had a couple of bends that were really restricting the airflow.  So this venting design is proper, but it still kind of sucks.  I have a idea in mind where I can raise the dryer on a pedestal that will align the dryer output with the vent port.  Then I can make a straight-shot tubing connection and get the dryer nearly flush with the wall.  That can be for another post.

One Reply to “Laundry Room Redo”

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