Laundry Room / Butler's Pantry

Cabinet guys have been here and installed cabinets in the laundry room and added the missing cabinet doors for the kitchen. I'm so happy with the way it came out!!! We ended up doing wood counter-tops, from IKEA, ourselves. They are super affordable and not that complicated of a DIY project.

Cabinet doors around fridge were installed.

Also added a pot rack in front of the hood. It is made of 2 Fintorp rails (and Fintorp hooks) from IKEA. They are very easy to trim to size and you can connect as many as you need together.

Installing laundry cabinets

 The cabinets are custom made by the same cabinet maker that made my kitchen. If you're in Arizona and would like his contact info, email me and I'd be happy to send it to you.

The sink is a Domsjo single bowl farmhouse sink. It is meant to be inset, but we rigged it to be undermount. That lip on the sink is meant to rest on top of the countertop, but if you cut a notch out in the cabinet front you can lower the sink to be under the counter.

Support brackets below sink.

I ended up changing the location of the sink from where I thought I'd put it when we built, so the plumbing had to go quite a distance.

After going back and forth between countertop choices I found that Ikea had a top that would work with only one seam at the faucet.

I made a template out of poster board.

This is 2 pieces of IKEA's Varde.

 Fitting the template on top of the two pieces.

First we cut out the outline and put in place to make sure the fit was perfect. Then we cut the opening for the sink.

Using a Dremel to round the edges of the sink cutout

  The Varde countertops come packaged with two metal rods running in a groove across the width. That kinda sucked because I ended up with two gaps at the top of the sink opening. That was unexpected, but Thomas did a fantastic job of making wood plugs that practically disappear.

 Stained with a mix of mostly English Chestnut and just a bit of Red Mahogany and finished with 3 coats of wipe on poly.

Sanded the top with steel wool until smooth as glass.

Close-up of the wood plugs at sink

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Dyeing an Ektorp Slipcover

* This chair was featured on Ikea Hackers (YAY!! Thank you Jules!!) and some of the comments said that RIT dye fades really fast. I've had the chair for six months now and I haven't noticed any fading. I've posted a recent picture at the bottom of this post.

This was a white cover for an Ikea Ektorp chair that I dyed fuchsia. I was so nervous about getting the color right and that the dye would stain my washing machine. BUT....the color turned out exactly the way I hoped and my washing machine didn't permanently stain! 

I used liquid RIT dye that  I purchased at Albertson's grocery store. RIT has a great website with recipes for many custom colors here. My exact color wasn't on their website, so I guessed a bit. I knew the slipcover was about 7lbs (shown on specs on Ikea's website) and so I bought 3 bottles. My mix turned out to be 2 bottles of purple and 1/2 a bottle of cherry red. 1 bottle of RIT is good for 2lbs.of fabric.

 I set the washer to the largest load setting. First I washed the new slipcover then I removed it from the washer. I then filled the washer with hot water, added 1 cup of salt, 2 bottles of purple dye and half a bottle of cherry red. I stirred this with an old broomstick for about 2 minutes before I added the wet cover. Then I manually stirred the cover around in the dye for about 5 minutes before having the washing machine agitate the cover for 30 minutes, then let it drain and rinse and spin.

 I repeated the rinse cycle two more times until the rinse water was mostly clear.


 To wash the washing machine I ran two old white towels through the wash cycle with detergent and 1 cup of bleach.

I did NOT put the cover in the dryer. I prefer to put the damp cover on the chair and let it air dry. That way it will naturally shrink and tighten on the chair. Polyester does not take the dye so below you can see the sections of the cover that remained white.

 The zipper and stitching also remained white.

 

  Here it is, below, after drying.

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                          1 day after dyeing                                                           6 months after dyeing

 

Front Yard Fencing and a Mailbox

I've kind of stalled-out on the yard work for a while, but we've made a lot of progress building a ranch fence in the front yard and (finally) a proper mailbox.

 The wood is pressure treated and (for those of us sick of staining/painting)  it's pre-stained. HOORAY!! We found these at Home Depot.

Still working on this side.

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Screwing new mailbox to post.

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 Talavera house numbers.

 I bought the mailbox at Signature Hardware. It will be interesting to see how it ages.

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My cabinet guy, Rodney,  is coming this week to get measurements for laundry room cabinets. I wasn't sure how I wanted to do this room and I wanted to live in the house for a while to get a feel for what I needed. I was going to put a freezer in here, but now I don't think I need one.

Laundry room as it is now:

Some of the inspiration photos I sent to Rodney.

The drawing he came up with:

Tall cabinets on the left, sink in front/center, and the washer and dryer on on the right with cabinets and hanging bar over the top. This room got SMALL real fast! I'm going with the same shaker style of white cabinets that I have in the kitchen.

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