Making the Mathis Home: December 2014

I know it's not the most important space to update in a home, but in our case, it was necessary. The garage is not only where we store items and park our cars, it's the 'laundry room'. When we first saw the house this room scared me.

Imagine (because I did not accurately document the 'before') that there was a wall behind Stephen at the back of the garage. You can see the doorway framing still remaining after he took the sledgehammer to the rest of the wall. It was too much fun for him! Behind Stephen in the very back corner of the garage was where the dryer was vented and placed.

On the opposite side of this skinny little back room was where the hot/cold water hook-ups were located for the washer.

This didn't work for several reasons.
1) We couldn't use the space I between to store anything because it would be in our way whenever we needed to do laundry.
2) Who wants to carry wet laundry from one side of a room to another. We already don't like to do laundry period. Add that to it and we would never have clean clothes.
3) It was cold and scary out there. Eek!

One plus - there was a brand new window. :)

Do I need to point out that the wall never was drywalled. It was insulation and 2x4s always. The back existing wall with insulation had not been touched by the time I took this picture. Cute, right? I think not!

Last year at Christmas time, we finally got around to moving the piping so that we could actually have our own washer/dryer at our house. (We were taking laundry to the in-laws on Sunday while we had dinner. It was very 'college' of us.)

I learned a lot about plumbing from my brother, who has been a major help on all stages of this garage transformation. I learned how to cut copper pipe. I learned how expensive plumbing supplies are. I learned how to attached PVC pipes. I learned how to solder pipes. Educational experience for me for sure!

This is the vent pipe going through the roof.

We had to get the pipes to run along the back wall so that we didn't have floor to ceiling pipes in our way. We knew we would have to enclose what we couldn't put on the back wall with a knee high wall.

.....Thennnnn our garage stayed like this for a year. I used to be so embarrassed by our garage that I didn't even want to leave our garage doors open. BUT, we were able to have our very own washer/dryer. I didn't even care if they were in the garage.

And, I cheated on this picture too. I had done a test of the pallets on the far left.

Ok, now onto the fun stuff. The most difficult part of the project was breaking apart the darn pallets. It was worth it in the end. The outcome is better than I imagined. The first pictures are of the knee high wall enclosing the pipes and then it's the progression of the wall being built.