All Walled Up & Nowhere to Go + New Appliance Adventures

I certainly hope you all have had time to recover from my last entry. Don't we all wish renovating could be prettier? I really enjoyed reading and very much appreciated all the comments and encouragement. Thank you all!

Well, our current project has been walling up the doorway between the dining room and the laundry room. Back when the house was first built in 77, the laundry room was originally a very tiny kitchen that you entered from a doorless entry in the hallway. You had access to the dining area from another doorless entry at the other side of the "kitchen". When the previous owners remodeled and added on to the house, they converted their tiny kitchen into the current laundry room (their washer and dryer was once in the bathroom as we discovered when we gutted it) and beyond the dining area, built a bigger kitchen, a sunroom, the garage and an unfinished bonus suite and bathroom above the garage. They probably almost doubled the size of the house, fortunately for us:)

But there really is no need for us to access the laundry room from the dining area. The only reason would be because the storage shelves in laundry room have served as our pantry area for years. It would be a little awkward to continue walking through the living room to access our "pantry" via the hallway everytime we cooked a meal. But we plan on building or buying a stand alone pantry for the kitchen to resolve that issue.

In my last entry, you saw a sneak peak of some of the work involved in walling up the doorway. Mainly you just saw the mess, lol...I'll post more project pics as we finish up. It hasn't been very hard so far - removing the folding doors and framing, adding studs, putting up drywall...

Here is where we are right now. The wall is ready to be taped and mudded...and guess who is going to do it? Yours truly! A friend of ours who has a lot of experience with drywall was going to help us, but like hubs, he stays really busy and between them, it's been hard to schedule time to get it done. I'm chomping it to bits to finish the wall so that we can paint, add crown moulding, and paint the ceiling. We're so close! Then we can move on to something else for a change.

Hubs isn't so sure that I can mud the joints and make them look seamless with the rest of the wall, but I think I can do it. We'll just have to wait and see:) So I did a little prepwork today. When the house was first built, the contractors didn't cut the old drywall nice and straight for the doorway framing, so when we butted our nice straight new drywall up against it, there was quite a gap between the two pieces near the top. I had to use a special compound that dries really hard to fill in that gap and a couple of other spaces. Tomorrow, I'll give the joints a little sanding and then start taping and mudding. It's going to take two or three thin coats I do believe.

Oh, do you see my paint colors in the photos? The bottom shade is the primer, the middle shade was my original paint choice, and the top shade is what we'll be going with instead. It's kind of hard to see, but it's kind of a warmer limier-but-not-too-limey green. It will go above white beadboard, which I can't wait to install:)

I don't think I've shared photos of our new washer and dryer yet, so here they are! We LOVE them! Everybody loves doing laundry now. I promise you, for the first few days, hubs would rush home from work and do laundry. I was sure to leave him some things to wash because I can't imagine how disappointed he'd be if I hogged all the dirty laundry for myself. Before our new washer and dryer, we dreaded doing laundry. Our old washer was so loud and "active" , plus we had to run the dryer through two cycles or more before the clothes would dry. Sometimes, if we put clothes in the dryer and forgot about them before we had a chance to run the dryer the second time, the clothes would get stinky and we'd have to wash them all over again. What a pain! I'm really looking forward to remodeling the laundry room someday, too. But for right now, I'm mighty pleased with just having a new washer and dryer!

And did you know that Hubs totally surprised me and had a new dishwasher delivered, too? Our old dishwasher needed a replacement part and we've just been handwashing for the last 3 or 4 months. I've hinted at wanting a new dishwasher to match the other appliances, but I knew we really didn't *have* to have one. So this was a very happy surprise to be sure! BUT, we're having a few issues with it already, unfortunately.

When the Home Depot guys installed it (or I should say, the people Home Depot hired to intall it), they didn't push the black plastic trim (where you bolt the dishwasher to the cabinetry) back far enough and on the right side near the top. The result is that the trim sticks out a quarter of an inch beyond the cabinetry. It looks bad! What is more, when they put the screw in, they didn't screw it straight but at an angle near the surface, which caused the wood to buckle and crack. The plastic trim also cracked and is sticking out. They sent someone else out to look at it and he said they needed to replace the trim and that he'd be back the next day to it. Next day, he called hubs in the late afternoon to say he was on his way but he never showed. And he didn't come the next day or the next either. It has now been more than a week since the dishwasher was (badly) installed. Plus no word on what is going to be done about the damaged wood.

We're also not happy with the way the dishwasher looks at the bottom. It just looks so raw and unfinished like something should cover those holes. Our old diswasher had a panel there but we were told this is how our new one is suppose to look. I'm supposing they were designed like this with the idea that a kickplate or something would be installed across the screw holes or maybe this model is for more of a custom built-in area? I don't know. Hubs and I are both perplexed. Oh, and also, the hard plastic backing on the control panel keeps peeling/popping up. It just won't lay flat. I told hubs we should just try and get Home Depot to replace the whole thing. He snapped all these photos you've seen here to take to the management in person - so we'll see how that goes. I feel bad for Hubs because the dishwasher was his special surprise for me and now we're having so many problems with it.

We got the girls' hardwood flooring ordered and now just need the time to go and pick it up...and we've ordered all the pine doors for the house from South Eastern Salvage - YAY!

I hope you all are doing well!