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The Farmhouse Laundry Room: Before + After

Kate Richards

After.

As far as befores and afters go, this one isn’t super sexy. In fact, it looks quite boring…but for me, this “room” was one of the biggest and best changes we made in the house. Unfortunately, I don’t still have the true “before” shots because my computer at the time took a dump and I lost them. But let me paint you a picture.

Here is the downstairs hallway (post-renovation). That door right there, marked “laundry”, existed pre-renovation.

After.

After. The original door did not have a kitty door. But I digress.

But instead of opening into a laundry room, it opened to two awkward steps up into what was a big crawl space under the house. Filled with dirt. It was just a door, that opened into dirt. At some point (probably the 60’s or 70’s when the downstairs was added on), someone poured a slab of concrete just big enough to fit a washer and dryer on in the center of said dirt. So this door opened into the bowels of hell, with a washer and dryer marooned in the middle. You had to trudge through said dirt to do your laundry. It was super efficient to pull clean clothes out of the dryer in a silt-filled environment. And you better not drop a damned thing, that’s for sure.

Also, while there was this magical, Narnian door separating the Earth’s inner core from the rest of the house, you can probably imagine how the dust would creep in around the edges into the rest of the house. It was neat.

Lord, I wish I had those photos. We actually had a big, burly demo guy refuse to go in there the entire time he worked for us.

Needless to say, it was dark, it was sketchy, and I quickly took to calling it “The Oubliette”.

ou·bli·ette

/ˌo͞oblēˈet/

noun

  1. a secret dungeon with access only through a trapdoor in its ceiling.

    Origin

    late 18th century: from French, from oublier ‘forget’.

  2. see also: the movie The Labyrinth.

Before-ish. Just envision replacing all the wood and paneling with dirt and cobwebs and you will have an accurate before shot.

We very quickly set about sealing it up, because, in the initial phase of our renovation, we were living downstairs while we gutted the upstairs. And we needed a make-shift kitchen. The Oubliette was the only option. We did what we could with our upside down budget at the time; adding unfinished walls and floors, and then putting in a small sink, some cabinets, a microwave, and a fridge so that we could make do until our real kitchen was finished upstairs (which took two years). It was much more useable than The Oubliette dirt pit, but the walls still weren’t fully done or sealed, so it was always kind of still open to the crawl space dirt.

It sat in this semi-finished phase for almost a decade because there were always more pressing renovation issues.

Before-ish.

But finally…FINALLY:

After.

After. The fridge was moved to an alcove just to the left of the sink (just off camera in this shot), which was much more functional…especially for a beer fridge (which is what it became once we had our main fridge in our real kitchen upstairs).

After.

Yes, it’s a crawl space. And so yes, the ceiling is low and very unfinished old lumber and there are weird support posts hanging out in the center of the room. BUT YANNO WHAT?! It’s clean and pretty damned functional. And quite less bowels-of-hell-ish.

Also, it’s where the cats’ home base is. And their Litter Robot (read more about my obsession with this ridiculous, life-changing thing here). It’s important for them to have a safe space with no dogs allowed.

After.

Chickens are sometimes allowed. But dogs…NEVARR.

After.

So yeah. I know it’s not the most exciting space in the house. But damn if I don’t love it the most out of the entire place. It’s really nice not having to fish clean socks out of 100-year-old-under-house-dirt.

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