It is Sunday night and I am so tired I almost didn’t write this post (the horror!!) It’s been a busy weekend and today has been a really busy day … but we have to talk about utility rooms because they can’t talk about themselves.

I spent 4 hours this morning hanging out at the home my firm had on the Dallas AIA Home Tour. While that in and of itself isn’t very interesting, one thing that made the time well spent was the surprising number of people that came up and introduced themselves to me as readers of this blog. It was appreciated and in some cases, a moving experience, so if you were one of those people – thanks.

Once that was done, I came home and decided that I needed to do some demolition work on the utility room. Since the other portion of the renovation I have going on is going so well (not to mention under budget) we have decided to expand the project to include a renovation to the utility room. We also decided to speed this particular project up because the concrete floors are scheduled to get re-finished starting next Monday. Because we know that the utility room will be laid out differently than it is now, we want the cabinets out so that the floors are done properly.

So here we go – let’s take a look at how I spent 5 hours of my afternoon.

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Here is the utility room in all of its “avocado-y” goodness. I didn’t think to take a picture of the room before I removed the cabinet doors (what? it’s not like I document all my projects… okay, yes I do.) This room is roughly 9′ deep and 6′-6″ wide so there is plenty of space to have a proper utility room with plenty of functional working area.

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Chips and salsa anyone? (if I have to explain that it isn’t funny)

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This wasn’t the simplest smash and rip demo job – there was plumbing involved … nothing too complicated, just the removal of a sink.

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First thing you have to do is remove the water supply lines and disconnect the P-trap …

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… make sure that you have a bucket underneath all your lines as you disconnect them because even if you have successfully shut your water off, there will still be some water in the lines themselves.

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Here is another little tip for you. When you are removing trim (whatever) from a drywall surface, use a chisel behind your hammer so that the head of the hammer doesn’t punch through the wall.

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So here is the fruit of my 5 hours of manual labor of ripping out 45-year-old site built cabinets. For my efforts, I was rewarded with a little present …

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… a perfectly preserved, disgusting rat skeleton. When we first moved into the house, there were loads of these jerks roaming around the property and I have waged war with them since my arrival. I’d like to think I am winning the war and this is my reward (meaning that I found a dead one, not a live one.)

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And here is the final cabinet free utility room. I will wait just a bit to show you the layout, it’s nothing earth-shattering. Like I said, this project was started because we knew we had to get the floors ready since the grinding begins a week from today (Monday).

Did I mention that we will be getting new front loading washer and dryer? I think I know which ones I’m getting but if you have some that you would like to recommend, let me hear from you.

Cheers

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