View Full Version : The Next to Last Renovation project for our house
When we replaced the original gas furnace from 1979 when our house was built with a heat pump we moved the air handler up to the attic. It used to be in a little closet in a space between the short hallway to our downstairs powder room and the kitchen. That freed up the space. Previously there was a narrow pantry cabinet in the hall to the bathroom beside it and a shallow 1 foot deep dish cabinet in the kitchen that butted up against both the pantry and furnace space. Now we're going to turn that whole space into a place for the fridge on the kitchen side so that we can put a much bigger pantry cabinet where the fridge currently is, and a shallow pantry cabinet on the hall side. In the bathroom we're going to stack the washer/dryer and turn the old dryer space into a floor to ceiling 2'x2' laundry cabinet and a 1' deep x 2' wide dish cabinet in the kitchen. This will give us a LOT more usable space.
Here are pics from what the contractor got done on day one. The plan for tomorrow is to finish moving electric and plumbing, and wall in the space for the fridge so that we can move it (we just got a new one and we can't use the left side because the door won't open against the wall). Then next week they will finish the work in the bathroom. The pantry cabinet in the kitchen will be semi-custom and we haven't even ordered it yet so it will probably take 2-3 months for that to be finished and installed, but everything else should be done by next friday.
This is where the fridge is going to go.
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This will be the shallow pantry space in the bathroom hallway.
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This is the bathroom. The washer/dryer will be stacked on the left side and there will be a cabinet on the right side. The cabinet will be 2'x2' floor to ceiling in the bathroom and 1' deep by 2' wide floor to ceiling in the kitchen. (where the wall is between the current fridge space and the new fridge space). (behind the left side wall is where the fridge is currently in the kitchen.)
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rosarugosa
2-20-24, 4:56am
Very cool, JP! I look forward to more pictures as your project progresses.
Can’t wait to see the final result! More pantry space is always a good thing.
happystuff
2-20-24, 9:10am
Nice! Hope it gets finished quickly and with minimal life interruptions!
Nice redesign! I agree that pantry space is really important and stackable washer/dryers are very space saving. My son has one. Well, so do I but mine is one of those little ones. The regular size stackables are great.
Definitely post the "after" pictures!
Random question. The current plan, and most simple, is to make the space for the washer/dryer 34 inches wide. Our units are 27 inches wide. That seems to be the current max size. Is that enough?
iris lilies
2-21-24, 8:58am
That project will make your spaces so much more usable. I really thought about stackable washer dryer in our renovation but DH was leery of them so since we had room, we went with conventional size side-by-side washer dryer. I would like the stackable ones just fine were it me alone.
ToomuchStuff
2-21-24, 10:36am
Random question. The current plan, and most simple, is to make the space for the washer/dryer 34 inches wide. Our units are 27 inches wide. That seems to be the current max size. Is that enough?
IMHE, just as long as you don't put a doorframe causing the space to be closed in (where you have to move the washer/dryer over after pushing in). That allows a shelf/roller, etc. to be placed between with laundry supplies that could be removed later if larger washers became a thing.
That project will make your spaces so much more usable. I really thought about stackable washer dryer in our renovation but DH was leery of them so since we had room, we went with conventional size side-by-side washer dryer. I would like the stackable ones just fine were it me alone.
We actually are just stacking the units we already have. We got an LG stacking thingy for like $25. I also spent another $20 on rollers so that we'll actually be able to move them out of the space if needed. I already can't move the washer so there's no way I would be able to move it with a dryer on top of it.
IMHE, just as long as you don't put a doorframe causing the space to be closed in (where you have to move the washer/dryer over after pushing in). That allows a shelf/roller, etc. to be placed between with laundry supplies that could be removed later if larger washers became a thing.
That makes sense. When we lived in the city the washer/dryer were stacked in a closet with a door. The closet itself was wide enough but they barely fit through the door and when the washer was dying our landlord was concerned because fullsize units had gotten bigger. The repair guy ended up being able to fix the existing unit so it didn't end up being a problem. At least not while we lived there.
One of the minor issues we had not addressed got resolved today! We don't have any extra of the flooring that is all over the downstairs. So if you look beside the fridge in it's new location it's 1/4 inch lower and not the same laminate hardwood look. (It's just the concrete base) Contractor came by today to drop off supplies and discuss the plans for work for the next couple of days when they will be finishing framing and initial drywalling. While we were in the bathroom I asked "what if we took 6 inches of flooring from the back of the area where the laundry machines go and install it at the front of the fridge space and then use plywood for the space behind that and for the back 6 inch space where the laundry machines go. He thinks that will work great.
Since he left I've made detailed plans of how everything needs to be laid out with measurements so hopefully by the end of day friday all that will be left is mudding/sanding drywall and purchasing the pantry cabinet to go where the fridge used to be in the kitchen. And there are three companies that sell cabinets from the company that made the rest of our kitchen cabinets who I've asked to discuss/quote making the pantry cabinet. Hopefully I'll have that last bit of this project finalized by the end of the week even if it'll be a month or two before we actually have the cabinet.
Always nice to have the nagging issues taken care of! Good idea on the flooring.
Good idea on the flooring.
Last week contractor and I had literally discussed putting plywood under the fridge and getting paint to match the kitchen floor color and hoping no one would notice. This will be a much better solution.
rosarugosa
2-29-24, 5:19am
That sounds like a good solution, JP.
iris lilies
2-29-24, 7:36pm
Your fix of the floor is a good one.
in our previous house the ceramic tile in front of the refrigerator cracked, 3 squares. It was old and we couldn’t match it exactly. I chose big squares, darker but in the same color to coordinate but still be obvious it was a repair. Not a brilliant solution, but acceptable.
One of the cabinet people got back to me to day that our cabinets and finish are still in production! The previous owner of our house had done the kitchen in spring of 2020 so it was anyone's guess if a four year old style was still being made, but apparently it is. So I'm now working with the cabinet maker to put together exactly what we need/want. Hopefully at least one of the other two will also quote the job so that we can make sure the responsive one isn't completely out of whack price-wise. Since the one has been more responsive I hope to give them the business but not if they turn out twice as expensive as the other(s) or whatever.
And the contractor and his team moved the chunk of flooring from the bathroom to under the fridge. It looks great. Tomorrow he's going to get paint that matches the color to use on the plywood that will go on the floor under the rest of the fridge and that will be done.
After tomorrow everything but mudding/sanding the drywall and painting it when that's done should be finished. Except for installing the custom pantry cabinet which will be weeks from now. Thankfully I have my shift at Marin Humane in the morning and then I plan to go to the local coffee shop to take a work conference call and maybe work for a while before coming home. Contractor and his team are nice people but dang they make a lot of noise...
It all seems to be progressing quickly! Congrats!
Wow, you got lucky the cabinets are still available. After the last few years, who knows what is available or not!
Wow, you got lucky the cabinets are still available. After the last few years, who knows what is available or not!
No kidding. And with something like kitchen cabinets the manufacturers seem to be eager to move on to the next thing. But no, we wouldn't be replacing all the kitchen cabinets if our style was no longer being made. We'd be figuring out a chaper solution like maybe painting the existing cabinets. Thankfully we don't have to go down that road.
Apparently we are just in time with this renovation. Speaking with the second cabinet store today apparently our cabinet manufacturer is downsizing the max door size. We need a door to cover a 23"x63" opening for a dish cabinet built into the wall next to where the new pantry is going. Currently they make a 23.5" wide door but as of March 11th are changing to a smaller maximum size. There are workarounds but having one big door is definitely the most attractive solution.
And I've been warned by both cabinet stores we're having quote this job that the pantry cabinet will take 5-6 weeks to build. That's a bummer, but I can live with it. We have a freestanding shelving unit that can sit in that space until the cabinet is installed. It just won't look pretty.
So I saved our contractor hours of aggravation today. (and myself probably hundreds of dollars of money paying them for the time to figure out a problem). He was installing a light fixture in the upstairs hall next to my office. When he turned the breaker back on after he'd finished nothing happened. His assistant was downstairs so contractor proceeded to flip all the breakers off and on in the breaker panel in the master bedroom upstairs on the other side of the hall from my office while contractor watched the hall lights to see if he was trying the wrong breaker. Still no power. Then his assistant commented that the downstairs bathroom was also dark. I was only half paying attention, mainly after my office went dark and the internet stopped working because the internet modem was now rebooting from the breaker affecting it getting turned off and on. I asked what was up and when he explained I said "Oh, it's probably the GFCI in the downstairs bathroom." Contractor was like "um, ok, we can try that..." and called down to his assistant to check it. That fixed it. Contractor sheepishly admitted that he would've never thought of that because current code is that GFCI outlets are supposed to be the only thing on an individual circuit. (you can have multiple bathrooms on one, but you can't include other lights on them so that you don't have a GFCI trip leaving the room dark.)
Thankfully we didn't need a permit for this project since no electric was being changed. If we had he'd now have to recircuit the downstairs bathroom GFCI onto the compliant GFCI in the upstairs hall bath, which got corrected when he did the reno of that room a year ago. A change like this could easily add several $1000 or more to this job because more walls would need to be broken open and then repaired, repainted, etc. That change for the upstairs bathroom last year was easy because all the walls were already opened up so it was just a minor step in a big project.
It's shear luck that I knew this quirk about the electric in our house. About a month ago the light switch in the downstairs bathroom broke so I had to replace it. To kill the power to it I tried hitting the GFCI switch on the outlet rather than have to figure out which circuit on the panel would kill the electricity to the switch and also since it was right there, not all the way upstairs in the bedroom. That had worked, making the repair of changing out the broken switch easy. I hadn't known that the circuit also included the upstairs hall light but it made sense since today the downstairs bathroom was also dead.
OK, that’s sorta funny!
Yeah it is. Although it's also got me thinking about risk management from my contractor's POV. I may actually turn this into a teachable moment for him. He's fairly young (early 30's) and just getting started as a GC. If we had pulled permits for this project and we now had to spend a ton of money to fix the layout of the circuits to meet current electric code I'd be a very angry customer. He can be forgiven in this specific situation since we don't have to fix it since there's no permit that has to be inspected and cleared. But if there was then he'd be in an awkward situation. From my perspective as an insurance underwriter he should be looking for worst case, or at least bad case, scenarios. One of those (probably very common) is that the GFCI circuit isn't compliant and needs to be fixed. I'm sure there are others but I'm not a contractor so I don't know what those might be. He needs to be looking for common issues like that (apparently old houses didn't have to have clean GFCI circuits but now they do). I haven't decided whether to have a conversation about this with him tomorrow but I'm leaning towards that I should because I really like the guy. He does good work and I want him to be a success. Making clear that I'm not upset but that I'm just wanting to help him not walk into a trap where he'll be on the hook for potentially thousands of dollars of rework of a nearly finished project as he would have been if we had pulled a permit and needed to clear it when the project was finished.
So everything is done but the last coat of paint. The first picture is the hall cabinet next to the bathroom. For now we're just going to reuse the painted wood slab doors that were on them before. Eventually we'll purchase two modern cabinet style doors. of equal size. The wall between the two is load bearing so it was non-negotiable. The result being that the left side space is 1/2 inch wider than the right side. The openings in the frames is 1 3/4" different. We can fix that when we get new modern doors and the fact that those doors are slightly off center won't be noticeable to the casual observer. At some point when the people after us live here they will probably try to move a shelf from one side to the other and realize that that isn't possible since they are 1/2" different and wonder "what were they thinking?"
SO spoke with the cabinet people about the bathroom cabinet today (to go where picture 3 is, next to the washer/dryer. Ultimately he decided that instead of a full floor to ceiling cabinet for $5,000 we need a counter height cabinet and floating shelves above it. We can get one from Living Spaces to match the vanity (picture 2) except with a butcher block top for $700.
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The counter height cabinet and floating shelves sounds like a good and much more economical decision!
rosarugosa
3-10-24, 5:44am
That is quite a significant savings, JP!
ToomuchStuff
3-10-24, 10:28am
Don't know what you need a cabinet there for, I would put some shelves and separate the laundry baskets with them down low, detergent and such at a convenient level.
The cabinet is going to be for the laundry hampers. And a counter to fold stuff. The shelves I’ll hold detergent and clean hand towels and such. Since it’s our public bathroom we want it to look presentable. Before this the laundry machines sat side by side with stuff like detergent piled randomly on them. It just didn’t look nice.
The countertop and floating shelves are going to be butcher block.
iris lilies
3-10-24, 12:07pm
The cabinet is going to be for the laundry hampers. And a counter to fold stuff. The shelves I’ll hold detergent and clean hand towels and such. Since it’s our public bathroom we want it to look presentable. Before this the laundry machines sat side by side with stuff like detergent piled randomly on them. It just didn’t look nice.
The countertop and floating shelves are going to be butcher block.
It looks like the shelves will be a wide enough workspace for folding laundry with a cat helper.
This morning I watched DH fold his laundry while William Bill insisted on helping/head butting. The cats must be accommodated in these renovation projects.
Yes. Cats are always good helpers. And ours, although shy, have decided that contractor is ok. They routinely supervise him to make sure he’s doing everything correctly.
The bathroom part of the project is complete. Still waiting on the pantry cabinet for the kitchen but should have that in a couple of weeks. Here's what the bathroom looks like now.
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This is what it looked like before:
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Ooh, that is much better! Very nice.
Ooh, that is much better! Very nice.
Thank you. It's a huge improvement. The old cabinets were pretty much useless because neither of us is anywhere near basketball player tall. And we used to have a laundry hamper just sitting against the wall in front of the washer so that guests would bump their knees on it if they sat down on the toilet. Now it's out of the way in the cabinet. And the cabinet top is a great folding area for clothes.
iris lilies
4-29-24, 9:04pm
Your “before “laundry nook looks pretty much exactly like my current new one. I originally thought we’d have stacked washer/dryer with a cabinet on the side, but DH was resistant to that for some reason. It didn’t matter that much to me so he won
Your “before “laundry nook looks pretty much exactly like my current new one. I originally thought we’d have stacked washer/dryer with a cabinet on the side, but DH was resistant to that for some reason. It didn’t matter that much to me so he won
If we weren’t tight in storage we probably wouldn’t have done this project. But with the space freed up by taking the furnace out of the hallway cabinet just outside the bathroom it made sense to reconfigure the whole space to maximize both the kitchen and bathroom. (The entire left cabinet in the hall was a 40 inch deep furnace closet. When we installed the heat pump we had the air handler moved to the attic since the ducts already ran to the attic and then to the bedrooms from there.)
I was lukewarm about the new stacked laundry machines but we got $400 selling the ten year old white ones on Craigslist and it’s nice having the dryer controls on the bottom instead of up by the ceiling. Plus, at 10 years newer these ones will hopefully last longer than the old ones would have.
Contractor finished the install of the pantry cabinet today! I’ll post pics of ithe kitchen and bathroom in a day or two nearby friend is coming for dinner so we still need to finish cleaning up and putting everything in their new spots.
Another thing we finally had done by contractor while he was here is installing two 8x8 outdoor shades on the back of the second floor. (The SW side of the house, where my office is). This should help keep office cool in the afternoons and cut our a/c usage a fair amount. Funny thing about that is that the sticks for the shade cranks are only four feet long so obviously not reachable since the shades are mounted 20 feet up. At first I was trying to figure out how to extend them then I did a search for ‘long pole with hook’ on Amazon and found one for $25 on Amazon! It arrives tomorrow, in time for Monday’s expected heatwave.
rosarugosa
6-28-24, 5:43am
Nice! Looking forward to pictures.
Our contractor replaced our front steps/deck, and they are coming back today to replace our cellar door which is pretty flimsy and rotted. That will be it for us for awhile.
The shades are an absolute success! It got up to 85 today, which would normally mean that my office would be up to 80 by 5pm. Instead it's 76 in the office right now.
The long stick with a hook had a few issues. First off the telescoping aspect of it means that when you twist the bottom the telescope junctions just slide on each other. So I had to run a piece of packing tape the length of it to stop that. I'll probably try to implement a more permanent solution tomorrow, maybe drilling holes at the joints and running bolts through. The other issue is that the hook doesn't mesh with the shades well so I ended up taping the wand that came with the shades to the top end of the pole. I'll try to more permanently attach that tomorrow as well. But overall I'm quite pleased with how effective the shades are. This should reduce our a/c electric usage pretty substantially.
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Great idea! Glad they’re working as expected.
Here's what the kitchen looks like finished. SO came up with the idea of having the bottom shelf of the pantry pull out so we could put the air fryer and induction burner there. This is so much more functional than before. Before we had a very shallow dish cabinet where the fridge is now, nothing where the cabinet next to the fridge is (that space was where the dryer sat in the bathroom), and the fridge was where the new pantry is. Food storage had been in two super narrow but sort of deep cabinets in the hall to the bathroom. Now it's in the cabinet next to the fridge, which is much more convenient and also laid out better for easy access. And the trash cans no longer sit in the middle of the room.
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rosarugosa
7-28-24, 6:24am
That looks nice and sleek, JP. We have those pull-out drawers too, and they are really functional.
happystuff
7-28-24, 8:21am
Very nicel Congrats!
iris lilies
7-28-24, 9:51am
Very nice. I love the way. The small appliance can be shut away.
littlebittybobby
8-5-24, 12:57pm
okay----looks very tidy & clinical. but no---i would suggest not using it. go out ta eat all the time. thata way, you don't mess it up. hope thatt helps you some. thankk mee.
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