The Laundry Room

Yes, we were planning on taking care of the bathroom. But then we decided to get a kitten, and I remembered how much I hated the laundry room floor. Which is where the litter box and cat food dish/water bowl have been and probably will continue to be. (Although maybe Penny and Emily can be trusted not to eat catfood anymore. Maybe.) And I remembered how I wanted to do better by that floor before we got another cat. With kitten arrival any day now (whenever we want to pick him up), I'm finally feeling the pressure of the deadline which is apparently crucial to taking action (for me).

Here's the laundry room in all its current glory, with everything on the floor removed
standing in the doorway from the kitchen,

the corner to the left as you step in (closing the door to the kitchen),

moving right, staring at our new washer and definitely-not-new-dryer (it squeaks! it squeals! you have to turn it off during naptime! or when you're talking on the phone!) under the single window, and

the next corner, with the ancient water pump, also noisy, especially around 5 am when it cycles or whatever it does.

Now imagine the camera continuing to swoop right, to the next corner (empty) and the expanse of dirty blank wall to

the final corner, where the door to the children's room and the door back into the kitchen intersect.

You might be able to tell from that last picture that the vinyl flooring in the kitchen/dining room is the same as this vinyl flooring. It is! And it was also in the laundry room when we moved here 3 1/2 years ago. Pretty much the only thing we did before we moved in was paint a few of the rooms and remove this "tile." I have since read that vinyl flooring does not work well in damp or humid areas. Like a laundry room. That probably explains why it was all loose and crusted with grime. So we just scraped it up, painstakingly, with much cursing, either late at night or during the day when someone else was presumably watching then-15-month-old Emily.

What we didn't know was that you should use heat to neutralize the adhesive substance used to stick-on the "tiles." Which means that the floor, sans tile, was squidgy underfoot. Very squidgy. Movie theater squidgy. Or circus squidgy. We mopped it. We scraped it (with the gigantic scraper I will be using tomorrow). Finally we just said F*it and rolled down some paint. It was supposed to be two or three coats, but ended up being only one. So it's looked crappy ever since, and small flakes of paint sometimes come up on our shoes. Plus it's very difficult to sweep or mop. When our cat was alive, he dragged litter all over it, not intentionally, but because he was old, so it was dirty, sticky, and ugly. Only marginally improved from the vinyl floor.

We're doing it right this time. Even if I have to do it myself! First I'm removing the paint with a toxic paint stripper, said scraper, gloves, protective eyewear, and dust mask. Then we're laying down some kind of floor sealant, then epoxy garage floor (with flakes! as seen on tv, but to be purchased from Lowe's!). Finally, I want to paint the dirty, white, concrete block walls. I will post updates, if only to keep myself motivated.

Final note: This little laundry room is actually the top third of the garage. The second (larger) third is the girls' bedroom, and the back third is storage behind a garage door. This was all done before we moved in, and not particularly well. That's another, much bigger project.