Fire in the dryer

Hey hey! Welcome to the weekend! It’s rainy and dark this morning and I LOVE it. Rainy days make me feel so relaxed – I’d take a couple a week. :)

So today’s post is a brief one but I was surprised when I learned this so I thought I would share it with you all.

A few weeks ago we noticed that every time we dried our clothes they came out of the dryer smelling AWFUL. Like…fire.

I was annoyed that something would be wrong with the dryer considering it’s only a couple years old:

Yes, the laundry room still isn’t done. We’re the only ones who see it so it’s down on the list. :)

I did some research online to see if it was something we could fix ourselves. We already clean out the lint every time we use it and at least a couple times a year we clean out the duct in the wall that goes outside. (SO important to do that – just do it yourself with a cleaning kit and a wet dry vac if your ductwork is short enough. Before we moved our laundry room ours ran through our garage so we hired out.)

So I couldn't figure out why we would smell fire. More specifically our clothes smelled like we had been sitting by a campfire. I read online that it is usually due to lint catching on fire inside the machine – which totally freaked me out. We stopped drying clothes in it for a few days till our appliance guy could come out and take a look.

To my relief but confusion right away he said it was nothing to worry about – and he asked if we had just painted inside our house. Funny he said that because that’s something I read online but dismissed it because we hadn’t been painting. THEN he asked about our floors – the ones we had just had restained in the family room and kitchen.

I was standing there wondering how in the world he would know we had just done our floors and told him yes and asked why. He explained that any oil-based or petroleum product will react with the gas dryer and cause the kerosene smell. Kerosene – THAT was the smell!

CRAZY. I had no idea. Our dryer is just below the floors that were refinished so that explains it. Funny thing is, when we first had the floors installed years ago our old gas dryer was on the same level as the floors and I don’t remember the clothes smelling like this. Maybe I was avoiding laundry at the time, who knows. ;)

So…if you ever do any work to your home that involves oil-based paint or have floors refinished – look out for that smell. We had aired out the house after the floors were done but it wasn’t enough obviously. I opened a bunch of windows that day and from then on they didn’t smell again – of course!

He said opening windows helps but otherwise you just have to wait till the floors really cure before it will go away. Crazy.

The good thing is that nothing was wrong with the dryer! Bad thing is we still had to pay for a service call. (He gave us a discount since it was so brief.)

Anyway, just thought I would share that little tidbit! If you notice that smell and haven’t had any work done in your home then get it checked out for sure. If you have and notice the smell around that time, it’s most likely from that.

Anyone ever had that happen? Do you all clean out your dryer ducts regularly? It goes a long way to avoiding dryer fires!

Making laundry easier

So, I’ve been doing lots of laundry. Laundry of epic proportions. I’m FINALLY determined to get our master closet under control. In true Sarah form I had to think about it for about a year but I’ve finally come up with a plan I think is going to give us tons of storage and be really functional. And maybe even pretty. :)

But first I’m doing every bit of laundry in the house. I hate laundry -- have I mentioned that once or a thousand times? I’m hoping to overcome that soon. Since I spent most of my day in the laundry room yesterday I decided to tackle a little project I’ve been meaning to do for a while.

Did you know you could switch the direction your dryer door opens? It’s a little thing, but if you’ve lived with one that opens the “wrong” way you know that it gets annoying after awhile. With ours we were trying to lean over the door to get clothes from the washer to the dryer, and leaning over it again to get clothes out when they were done.

I switched the door direction on our old dryer too so I knew it was a fairly easy job and decided to try this one. It took about 15 minutes start to finish – our old dryer (the old school kind) was even easier to switch.

Of course yours may be a little different but here’s a rundown on how I did it. First up, take the actual door off the machine:

I used a drill to speed things up a bit. Be careful because DANG the door is heavy. I looked at the instructions in our manual later and it warned in big fat words, “DANG THE DOOR IS HEAVY, BE CAREFUL.” OK the dang wasn’t there, whatever.

Just set it to the side for a moment:

On the other side there will be similar holes for the screws – mine were covered with little plates I just popped off:

Go ahead and just put those where the door was hanging before:

Then it was time to switch the hardware on the door. I laid it on the carpet and then took the screws out:  

Then used a flat head screwdriver to kind of pop the top part off. That part made me sweat a little but the instructions said to do it so I listened. It came off pretty easily:

I took the top part of the door (the one on the top above) and switched the little latch (the latch that keeps the door shut when you close it):

You just flip flop the hardware from one side to the other.

Then you do the same with the actual hinges on the bottom part of the door (the one on the bottom in that picture above):

You just take the screws out and then reinstall it on the other side. After the hinges are switched just put the top back on and screw it all together again. That’s it!

If you have a screwdriver you can do this, it really is easy. We have an LG set so if you do too yours will be pretty similar I’m sure. Even if it’s a different brand, they're all made to do this. (I think anyway.) Like I said, switching the door on our old dryer took even less time – maybe five minutes.

I got the door back on and it works – score one for me!:

And now the transfer of clothing is easy breezy. It really is the little things, yes?:

Although now I keep trying to open it from the original side, which I’m sure I’ll do for a full six months before my brain comprehends it.

Now I just have to finish the piles sitting in our bedroom. Anyone want to come over? No?

Did you know you could switch the direction of your dryer door? Next I plan to do the same to the mini fridge in the basement. :)

The Laundry Room: Making it work

Hello everybody! Hope your week is going well! I can hardly believe it’s Thursday already. Crazy pants.

I’ve been working on purging the basement (you can see one of my big projects earlier this week here) and it was when I moved on to the laundry room that I realized I haven’t shared progress in here since last year.

It’s been a year since I’ve blogged about this space when I built the shelf behind the washer and dryer:

When we got the new set I knew I wanted a top loading washer, so the little shelf along the back gives us a spot for some items we need within reach and it hides all the ugly stuff behind the set. :) 

But we’ve made some updates to make this a more functional space over the past year and although the room is still very much in between, I wanted to share some of them!

The room is smaller than we originally planned -- we had to work with beams in the basement so this room get a little tighter. It’s just over eight by five feet, which is still a dream compared to the mud/laundry room space we had upstairs before. A DREAM.

But with the washer and dryer taking up most of that space and a door to the storage room, I’ve had to be smart about storage and any additions in here.

We’ve always used one of those wooden drying racks that you open up on the floor, but this hanging rack from IKEA works just as well (and takes up way less space!):

I wanted small laundry baskets that would stay in here all the time and last year I found ADORABLE polka dotted ones at the container store:

One for lights, one for darks. It’s so great to just grab one and just dump it in the laundry. And they’re tall and skinny so they fit perfectly right next to the dryer.

I’ve added some storage in here so the shelf behind the washer and dryer only holds the necessities now. My glass jar for the detergent and a little box hides the dryer sheets:

 

I like the necessities to be cute, alright? :)

We moved the ironing board down here and it hangs next to the door:

We set it up right outside in the family room and watch TV while ironing. It makes it suck a little less. ;)

You can see a lot of the to do’s in the photo above – I installed that cabinet to use some of the awkward space in here and it needs to be finished up. I have ideas for the wall above it too. The storage room door needs to be painted (it will be black like the rest of the doors) and the trim all needs to be painted too.

One thing I did to help make this room a little bigger when we finished the space was to push it out to the family room area just a bit more than planned (to the right):

That allowed me to put double doors on the room instead of a standard door. I LOVE it – I can easily carry baskets or armfuls of laundry through the door without banging into them. (And yes, they still need hardware. On the list.)

I still love love love the hexagon tile we put in here – it was so inexpensive and looks great. It is chilly on bare feet though so I have small mats in front of the washer and dryer:

I’m always looking for one rug that would be the right size/color but it’s hard to find. These get dirty really easily so I don’t think they’ll stay forever.

And obviously we installed two small cabinets on the wall (that need to be painted) – I didn’t want it to be all cabinets and I didn’t want just shelving (I wanted some of the stuff to be out of sight), so we went with two. Initially I was planning on hanging a rod between them to hang clothes but quickly realized I didn’t want to look at that all the time. (And we really don’t keep clothes down here.)

So now I’m planning a mix of both hidden and open storage – shelves between the two cabinets. I’m also planning on bringing in more color to this space and doing some kind of treatment to that wall. Haven’t decided just what yet.

There’s still so much I want to do but it’s already wonderfully functional and it’s come a long way from how it looked just over a year ago:

Compared to how it looks now:

And yes…a year later I still LOVE having a laundry room in the basement. It was the right move for us but it may not be for everyone.

Do you have a big laundry room? Is it combined with your mud room or does it stand alone? This one is way bigger than the space we had in our old mud/laundry combo but I’m still always trying to use every bit of it as best as I can.

Would I do it again? (Laundry chute)

So every so often I like to update you on projects that I’ve done/purchases I’ve made to let you know how they’ve held up and if I like them as much as I thought I would. I’m always curious to hear that so I like to share in case you are wondering too.

I will say…I think and research and plan things to DEATH, so it’s rare that I regret doing anything. This one I’m still not sure about. :)

I shared our completed powder room a couple months ago and I’m so happy with how it turned out:

We have a huge powder room, right? It’s big as far as powder rooms go. We could have made it a full bathroom (it’s near my office which could have been another bedroom), but we went with the half. Anyway, I’m so glad we have a linen closet in this room.

What you didn’t see at that reveal, and many of you have already seen, was the big honkin’ tube inside the closet:

That is something I dreamed about for years and was SO thrilled to get installed. By now you’ve probably read the title of this post and deduced that this is our laundry chute. Smarty. ;) (You can see more about it here.)

What you didn’t see was the horrible, no good, did I mention horrible paint job I started last year. Originally I was going for red walls in this room and thought it may be fun to add a touch of red to the shelves (they needed to be painted anyway):

Ugh. I know. I mean, the photo is horrible but seriously…I KNOW. It was horrible. This one goes in the what was I thinking column.

I was going for white walls and bright red shelves, but somewhere along the way I got lazy and didn’t tape off (WHY?) so the paint got on the walls. And the PVC was always ugly -- initially I tried to get the lettering off the pipe using a method a reader mentioned, but it didn’t work for me. Then I thought, I’ll just paint it! Red! Like the rest of the closet! Brilliant!

Well red doesn’t cover well. Your tip of the day. So I stopped.

Anyway, I fixed it – more on that in a minute.

First up, the main purpose of this post. Would I do the laundry chute again? I’ve thought a lot about this lately and actually, I probably wouldn’t.

There’s a few reasons for this. The biggest – I never do laundry. I just…don’t. My husband does his own and I wait until I am out of clothes to wash my own. I will dig to the bottom of a drawer to find an odd sock before I will do laundry. It’s just my thing. I don’t hate laundry like I used to now that we have an actual laundry room, but I just don’t do it.

It’s my thing.

BUT. Because I don’t do it often, I wait till I can’t wait anymore and then I spend a day washing clothes, so in those instances it is nice to be able to just drop the clothes down the chute. Thing is, you still have to take the basket down to carry them back up when they’re done. So if I’m doing one load here or there I just take the clothes down in the basket because I’m going to have to bring them up in it anyway.

All that being said…our closet is a major disaster right now so I’m on a laundry binge. It’s laundry all the time – and I’ve been using the chute a ton.

Perhaps if we had more kids and more clothes I would use it more? Maybe someday when I’m totally and completely organized (snort) and I keep up with washing the clothes I will find it more helpful.

But for now…I walk the clothes down the stairs as much as I throw them down. I gotta say though – it’s fun. There is pure joy that happens when you throw the clothes down and hear them thump into the laundry basket. It kind of rocks. ;)

So…the chute is staying. Which brings me back to the hideous red linen closet. I finally painted it. The powder room was next on my decluttering rampage and like usual I couldn’t pass up this little DIY that needed to happen.

I used some paint I already had – it was a color called Billowing Clouds that I originally used to paint the powder room years ago. I didn’t want to spend a ton of time on this so I painted the walls and the shelves both the blue color:

Oh, I did prime first that red first, just one coat. Since I was painting the walls it took no time at all. I was able to prime, paint and organize the stuff in here in a couple hours. I’ve put this off for a year, and it took less than two hours. Story of my life!

You may notice the polka dots. ;) Yes, I covered the tube. YES…I obviously have no life. It was just so ugly. I went through a few options in my head for covering it and then remembered I had some contact paper. AND it matched the new paint. It’s like it was meant to be!:

See, I kind of have a life – I didn’t do the bottom part. Honestly it took about 15 minutes to cover it – and the dots make me smile when I open this door. :) I want to get some sticky tiles to put on the floor in there (I didn’t have the hardwoods put in the closet since the cuts would have been so tricky and added to the cost.)

By the way, a few readers wondered if that little bend in the pipe would keep things from going down and it doesn’t at all. Nothing has gotten stuck – even bulky towels and sheets because it’s so slick inside. So as far as laundry chutes go, this is a good one!

After decluttering the stuff in the bins in here I was able to get rid of one (that is a great feeling!). So even though we have half the space in here that we used to, everything still fits great:

And it’s pretty cute, seriously. I say even though other people won’t see a space, if you have to look at it every day it’s your prerogative to make it cute. :)

SO. Overall I do like having the laundry chute, but if I could do it again I would have waited longer before installing it. I think I would have decided that we really didn’t need it after all.

Have you ever done something in your house you are iffy about? Regret any renovations or decisions you made? I don’t know if I regret this one really, I just would have waited to see how things functioned without it.

DIY laundry room storage

Hey hey! Thanks for playing along with our fun birthday quiz this week. ;) We’ll announce the winner (and the answers!) tomorrow.

Today I wanted to update you on the (basement) laundry room progress. I’m so excited about this space – it is a dream come true for me to have a dedicated laundry room!

It’s not a big room, but it’s mighty. :) My original plan was to make it much bigger, but with the bathroom placement that wasn’t possible. I’ve found it’s six by nine size is more than enough though. I LOVE it.

Last time I shared this room with you I had just painted:

As soon as the floors, trim and paint were done, we knew we could move the washer and dryer down. (I worked like lightning to get those done!!) We were about to install them when a little (awesome) randomness happened. You know those state unclaimed money sites? (Indiana’s is here.) Well, long story short -- we realized we had been missing checks for years that were going to our old address…it was a nice little surprise. :)

So hubby wanted to use that extra cash to get a new washer and dryer set. And I didn’t argue, duh. (He’s a keeper!!) We shopped around, found a set we loved, then went to Sears (just because we love their service), and they price matched the lowest price we had found ($200 cheaper than their price, each!), plus gave us 10 percent off…BOOM.

So anywho, we were lucky enough to get a new washer and dryer set and we got them for a great price. I’ll show you more of those in a minute, but first I had to come up with a solution for a problem I realized after they were installed.

You see, I had forgotten that the washer and dryer don’t go right up to the wall when installed. There’s all those…uck…CORDS. And hoses.  If there’s anything worse than cords, it’s hoses. They make me tremble just thinking about them.

So we lost a good six inches of floors space in the room, which in the end has been fine. But man, I did not love the mess of stuff you could see behind them:

Yes, I know we are probably the only people that would see it. Yes, from the front you can’t really tell. But it drove me crazy. YES, I am weird! Welcome to Sarah’s mind.

So I came up with a solution and I’m tickled at how it came out. I’m sure I’m not the first to do this, it’s nothing earth shattering. I decided to make a shelf behind the washer and dryer – it would hide all that junk and be useful.

I used about half scrap wood, half some I picked up at the hardware store. I put a one by two into the wall as a “cleat” or support at the height I wanted the shelf:

I just used long screws and secured it into the studs along the wall.

Then I just cut down and stained a piece of wood  (about six inches wide) that would lay on the top. I used my nail gun to nail it down into the supports:

And I had a shelf!

For a little extra stability, and because I had plenty of wood left, I put another wide board down the front on the left:

And to hide even more, a smaller board (1 by 2) on the other side:

Now you can’t see anything back there! YESSSS!

I still had a little wood left, so I created a shelf off to the side as well:

It does exactly what I wanted it to do – hides the ugly stuff, but keeps all of the laundry necessities within reach:

I still need to add a coat of satin poly to the top, just to protect the wood (it makes it easier to wipe down as well). And this is by no means cute or styled, just functional – but I love it!

The washer and dryer are LG and we went with the top loader washer. I just didn’t want to deal with the mildew/sealer issues that I’ve heard about the front loaders:

I’m also a throw-things-in-last-minute kind of girl, so I NEED to be able to add clothing in after the load starts. The top loader allows me to do that, from my understanding you can’t with the front loaders. We love these machines – the dryer especially. I love how it senses when things are dry – I used to check our old dryer at least three times each time we dried a load and now when it’s done I know the clothes are actually dry.

It’s the little things. :)

I love seeing the progression of how rooms come together – here’s the room with just drywall:

And with the tile floors, paint and the W/D set installed:

Next I’ll share how I’m organizing this space, and what I hope will be a bit of pretty. :)

So are you a top or front loader person? :) Do you hate that empty space behind them as much as I do? Have you checked out your unclaimed site? Go for it – you may find you’re owed meeeeellions!! Or $50, whatever. It’s money. :)

Painting tips (and the laundry room walls)

Hey there! I’m back with another update on the basement laundry room. When we started finishing our basement in January, we decided to move the washer and dryer to a dedicated room down there. Some people thought I was crazy, but I can now tell you from experience, it’s freakin’ awesome. ;) (You can see the reasons why I did it here.)

I told you about the paint color plan for the basement a couple of months ago, and I knew I wanted to paint the laundry room this Pebble Beach color from Benjamin Moore:

I got these matched at Sherwin Williams because I’ve fallen in love with that paint, and I got it for a great deal during one of their sales.

Since I was painting the laundry room, I figured this would be a great time to recap some of my favorite painting tips. I use these pretty much every time I paint and they keep the process as cheap as it can possibly be!

First up, the dreaded preparation. If I can avoid this part, I do. :) I showed you how I fill holes in the walls here and that’s still my method. But if there are small nail holes I’ll just quickly fill them with spackle and wipe away the excess (don’t even need to sand) or just leave them alone – paint fills them in if they are small. ;)

I saw an idea in Family Handyman a while back that recommends using nails to make holes in the rim of the paint can to prevent the paint from filling up that area and dripping all over the sides:

I have tried it and honestly it didn’t do much good. I used large nails and lot of holes too – it just didn’t drain well. So I stick by my easy (but messier) method, which is just wiping the paint from the rim with my finger and onto my paint t-shirt:

I wear that one pretty much every time I paint. If I don’t have it on, I just grab a rag and use that. I always find it’s impossible to keep my hands completely clean while painting anyway, so why not just use them. ;)

I saw a tip from Sabrina Soto on HGTV once a while back that I still use – before I paint I grab painters tape and use it to clean off the roller:

(You’ll be seeing a lot of that green FrogTape around here by the way, I’m one of the members of their new Blog Squad, whoot!!)

This way the fuzzies end up on the tape and not your walls! (And the cheaper your roller, the more fuzz you’ll get off, in my experience.)

Here’s another tip – it took me a while to realize this, but even if I’m painting a regular room with normal ceiling height, I put my roller on a pole, instead of holding the roller. It is SO much easier on your body to stand back and let the long pole do the work. My back and shoulders used to ache when I used just the roller. Now it doesn’t bother me much at all because I use the pole.

By the way, please don’t buy a pole at the store just for painting!! Any standard broom that comes apart (and most do) will attach to your roller:

 

You can’t tell from these photos but that red broom handle is covered with paint. ;)

As far as trays go, I just use the plastic liners as my tray, without a metal tray underneath. You don’t need it. I’ve tried the metal paint trays where the paint is supposed to peel right off and uh, it did not happen for me. Maybe it was the fault of the operator, but it was ridiculous. Save your money. :)

When it comes to small jobs where I’m just using a small foam roller, I will either just dump some paint on a couple paper plates:

Or I will skip the plastic tray all together and use up some of my plastic shopping bags and line the metal tray with it:

If you do this, make sure to turn the bag inside out if there is print on it. :)

I don’t buy the little handheld paint trays specifically made for cutting in with a brush. Instead I use coffee cups and wash them out after each use:

If you don’t have any (we don’t drink coffee so we don’t have a ton), you can get them for about 25 cents at Goodwill. They hold just enough and are the perfect size for a paint brush. The handle makes them easy to hold on to and carry around the room.

One more tip I learned years ago – if need to stop mid-painting and have wet brushes, stick them in a Ziploc bag or a plastic grocery bag (tied up) and they will stay wet for days.

Some say to put them in the fridge but I’ve never found it necessary – they stay wet just as long left out as well:

If I have paint left in a tray I’ll wrap it up in a bag and tie it up to keep it till I’m ready – that way I’m not trying to get all that paint back in the can (you’ll always lose some). You can keep used rollers ready to go that way as well! (Although I find they dry out quicker than the brushes.)

And when are ready to wash the brushes – you’ll love this little guy:

This brush comb is about $5 but has saved me a TON in new paint brushes. You just brush it through while washing them out. It gets all the bits of paint out and leaves the bristles nice and straight while they dry out. I LOVE this.

So there you go! A few of my favorite painting tools and tips! If you have never painted and are nervous about it, don’t be. I hadn’t put a drop of paint on a wall in my life before the day we closed on this house. And that first day I painted our family room and it’s still the same today…so I did OK. ;)

Back to the laundry room -- here’s the space before we started:

And here it is after the tile was installed, Pebble Beach was painted on the walls, and baseboards and quarter round were installed:

I was up at the crack of dawn one morning scrambling to get that trim down so the washer and dryer could be installed! By the skin of my teeth, I tell you.

I thought this color was going to be much lighter than it was – but there isn’t any natural light so I think with that it would read MUCH lighter. I love it though – it’s coming together just as I had imagined! I’m going for a “rustic elegance” look in there – that term came to me after I started the shelves in here and I think it’s fitting. I’ll show you those soon! 

So do you use any of the tips I mentioned? Do you have any painting tips I missed here?  I love hearing new ones so share away!

**Don’t forget -- the next Show Us Your House party is next week and it’s time to show off family rooms! That one will go up Monday morning this time – probably around 10 a.m. EST. I know that will be different from my past link ups that go up at night so I wanted to make sure to let you know!

Have a great weekend!!