Framing in Laundry and closing the exterior door

In our house the laundry room is part of the kitchen. So when you walked in the front door you could see the washer and dryer. We have talked to the neighbors and that is how all the houses are in this sub-division. That was something Mike couldn't live with. He wanted to enclose it to make it its own room. It was hard for me to picture it but now it makes total sense. 

The accordion door is the only thing that separated the washroom from the kitchen

As you can see the washroom was part of the main living area where everyone could see it.

View from the kitchen

Mike decided that the best way to close in the laundry room was to also close in the pantry shelves and make the pantry larger. I loved that idea. You can never have a big enough pantry. After demo of the small decoration wall Mike began framing in the laundry room. 

Framing the new wall for the laundry room

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At the end of the new wall was an exterior door. Since there is already a sliding glass door at the other end of the kitchen we felt that it would be okay to remove this door to add the bigger pantry.

We added insulation and electrical outlets

Next we will install the drywall.

Bedroom Doors, Trim and Primer

 After we patched all the holes in the wall and put new trim boards up we were ready to primer the room. It was really important to primer the rooms since we need to seal the walls from the smoke. We got the Kilz Primer at started painting. We found out later that you have to buy a special primer to stick to the nicotine stains. Our primer began to peel off the walls like a sunburn. We then had to repaint the rooms with the expensive but correct primer. 

Installing the new doors

New doors 

Installing Trim Boards

Doors ready for paint

Walls and ceiling ready for paint

Notice where the picture used to be. That is how stained the walls were.

Trim Boards Installed

Tapping of windows for paint

Door Trim

First Coat of Primer

First Coat of Primer

Mike was painting the rooms in the middle of summer. It was so hot in the rooms because we had to tap off all the windows. We had to tear holes in the plastic to get some fresh air in.

What a difference a coat of primer makes.

Ceiling Lights

 When we moved into the house the first thing we notice was that all light fixtures were all the wall and not hanging from the ceiling. They were small sconces on one wall that did not give off very much light. We wanted to re-wire the lights so they would be on the ceiling and in the center of the room.

Master Bedroom Light (the only light in the room)

Notice the windows. This house has awesome windows that let a lot of natural light during the day.

Notice the dry wall was patched where the old sconce was.

The crawl space in the attic to get to the wiring was so small Mike had to cut a hole in the drywall and fit himself through it. 

New hole for light fixture and the wall is all patched up.

Master Bedroom Fan

Bedroom Lights

Rewiring Master and Guest Bedroom

As you can see in the pictures the previous owner tried to update the wiring and failed. They wanted to update the 2 prong plugs to 3 prong but only ran the wiring inside the room. Mike was not having it. He had to "make it right". I tried to convince him otherwise but in the end he was right. 

Electrical Inside the Room

Removing the drywall for access to run new wire

Running the new wire

Hanging new drywall

Mudding the new drywall

Finished product

Finished Product