a long over due project

My intentions when I first retired was to spend November raking leaves and December preparing for and enjoying Christmas. January and February I had designated for repainting the living and dining room. I thought those two months were the perfect time to get that out of the way.

Well, I never could quite get in the mood to paint, especially since I hate painting ceilings and moving furniture. But I was in the mood to revive my Etsy business, so that is what I did instead.

By March, there were numerous days that were more than suitable for gardening, which I did at every opportunity. But that is when the mood hit me to tackle an inside project I’d been putting off for years. If there is one thing I’m learning now that I have more time, it is when the mood hits you, “go with it”. It is so much easier to tackle a project when you heart is in it, than to force yourself to trudge through it.

I have a window in my laundry/utility room that has been painted shut for years. It is the only original window left in the house. In order to open it, I either had to replace it, which was more the expensive option. Or to take a heat gun to parts of it to get it down to bare wood so it will open . . . the cheap option, but more labor intensive. The window not only would not open, but it was still the previous color of the kitchen.

I wish I had taken a before picture and the process so you could see the mess that it makes when you strip off years of paint with a heat gun. Making the project even harder is that the window was over the washing machine, so it had to be pulled out. I had built the shelf for the window, so that also had to be removed. Once the shelf was removed, I briefly considered just removing the window molding and replacing it with new. But old window molding with years of paint, doesn’t come off easily. In the end it was just easier to strip the parts of it that were keeping the window from moving.

Once stripped and repainted, it was well worth all the effort. The transformation made the room seem as if it was smiling.

With a new faux arrangement on the shelf and my beloved little bee plate hanging on the side of the cabinet, the room seemed complete. Knowing I had finally knocked out a project I’d been putting off for ages suddenly made doing laundry enjoyable again.

But, as with most projects, one thing leads to another. When the washing machine was pulled out, I realized I had never repainted the wall behind the washer and dryer. So . . . that realization led to more painting. And one wall led to another.

This room not only holds the washer and dryer, but the furnace, the hot water heater, and pantry shelves. It has three doors, one to the screened in porch, one to the garage, and one to the kitchen. It is a room that is used a lot and has many functions. If it was a dead end destination laundry room, it wouldn’t matter so much if it didn’t look so nice, but it is a room I walk through numerous times a day.

It will never be a high style mud/laundry room as you so often see today on social media. But since it is the entrance to my porch and back yard, and the furnace cannot be hidden, I have made every attempt to make it as cheerful as possible.

No matter how small the room, there is always a way to make it functional with the things you need to have at hand, and decorate it in a way that makes it presentable to others. Even if it is a utility room.

When my daughter used to live at home, we made our own laundry detergent. Refreshing the room brought back those memories, so I pulled out my big glass jar and decided to make it again.

There are many recipes online for making your own laundry detergent and the only thing I used not pictured in this photo is a box of baking soda.

The only difficult and time consuming part of making your own detergent is shredding the Fels-Naptha soap, which is most likely why I got away from doing it.

I question the validity of it being more natural and chemical free considering all of the separate ingredients in it, but it definitely is less messy than the drippy liquid detergents. And definitely prettier than the plastic jugs of detergent.

It is so nice to have a fresh and clean laundry room and a window that I can open again. But this project did lead to also repainting the kitchen and then the bathroom. It was definitely one way to make the roller coaster cold, windy, and snowy days of March pass by quickly. I’m going to consider this my spring cleaning and carry on in my gardens from here, totally guilt free.