We had initially planned to start at the front door and repaint the living and dining rooms first, but starting with the laundry room was appealing for a number of reasons.

  1. The previous tenant had taken her washer and dryer with her, so the room was mostly empty.
  2. Being able to wash our clothes seemed like a more important prerequisite to moving in than having a place to put a couch.
  3. It’s a small room that visitors aren’t likely to linger in, and we’re probably going to do a few things wrong on our first try.

Cleaning

The yellowed West wall featuring the original water heater in the Northwest corner.

Our plan was to get everything out of the room, clean, prime, paint, and then replace the floor before installing new appliances.

We dutifully followed the directions of disconnecting the water heater from power and running a tap until it was no longer warm. We had plenty of other things to do while we waited like removing the shelf brackets, peeling away the vinyl trim, and scraping the duct tape residue off of the window, but it takes a lot longer to run out of hot water when you want to! Jesse started to wonder if the water heater really needed to be replaced, given how admirably it was performing. Eventually, we found a sticker on the tank with a copyright of 1993 and he relented.

Those intimidating black smudges on the walls came off pretty easily with pine-sol and an all-purpose sponge.

A hose connected to a water heater drain using a plastic bag and thin medical tape.

When the water finally ran cold it was time to shut the input valve and drain the tank.

The tray was in the way of fitting a hose to the drain, so Jesse hammered it. He was looking for a reason to hammer something. We then discovered that the hose didn’t fit very well onto the drain connection! It was just a hair too small to get past the first threads and all the water would escape around the connection instead of following the hose. Being very prepared people who totally know what we’re doing, we had not brought duct tape.

Jen went on the hunt in the truck and found an old grocery bag and the medical kit that had been a free gift with our first car. Once it was snugly wrapped, we found that if we opened the tap slowly we were eventually able to get it to full flow without any leaks.

A flexible copper pipe is capped by a white hand towel secured with a floral scrunchy.

Shortly after removing the water heater, we discovered that when you run the water in the bathroom sink, it would also come out of this pipe here. We hadn’t brought anything to cap these pipes with and it was going to be a while before we could replace the water heater. We agreed to put a ‘do not use’ notice on the sink and wrap the pipe in a towel for good measure, creating this stylish hat.

Priming

Jesse holding a 2-inch brush, smiling at the painted laundry room door. All surfaces in the room have been primed in bright white kilz, creating a star contrast to the yellowed kitchen visible through the doorway.

We primed the whole room with Kilz 3. We calculated how many square feet of surface we would eventually need to prime, and went ahead and bought a 5 gallon bucket of it. Here Jesse is happily putting the finishing touches on the door, and you can see the stark difference between the bright white and the kitchen. That’s not a lighting illusion, the whole house was that yellow!

Painting

We decided to use Sherwin Williams Superpaint, mostly because a new one had recently opened in our area and had a really great grand opening sale.

We’ve picked a total of 9 paint colors for the interior, 11 if you count the ceiling tints. Each room will have 2 wall colors and a trim color that compliments both of them. We’re very excited about owning walls and color theory is fun.

This room received Gentle Grape on it’s East and West walls, Steely Gray on it’s North and South walls, and an Ice Cube ceiling. The trim will be painted in Icelandic, which is the background color on this page!
We’re really happy with how the colors work together. We would like to note that, for some reason, the Gentle Grape was a lot harder to work with. It didn’t adhere well to our primer and would come off on the roller when we tried to apply more. Even when we came back the next day to apply a second coat, the paint from the previous day sometimes stuck to the roller instead of the wall. We have a few theories about why it would behave so differently from the Steely Gray, but will hold off on guessing until we’ve worked with more colors.

Cost So Far

Our actual total expenditures so far are $577.72, but that’s including several gallons of paint that we haven’t touched yet and other supplies that are intended for other rooms. Let’s break down the individual cost of the painted laundry room.

At this point, we’ve bought a lot of tools and supplies. For the general supplies and tools which will be used in every room, we’ll keep a running total and divide it out into each room’s total cost. This cost will include a lot of things that we’ll have use for long after these rooms are finished like work lamps and the garden hose. There are a lot of standard household items that we’ve never had. Currently, the laundry room’s share of the general supply cost is $54.

We bought a gallon each of gentle grape, steely gray, and ice cube, which totaled at $96.80. We didn’t empty these gallons and are going to reuse all of these colors in other rooms. The estimated paint cost for the laundry room is about $50.

Homeguide.com lists the cost of repainting a room at $3-$7 per square foot of floor space, so our petite 53.5 square foot laundry room should cost $160-$374. $56 might not seem like a huge savings, but we’re feeling pretty good at managing a total cost that’s 35% less than the low estimate.

Next week: Fun with Floors!

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