renovation project

Last month we undertook a project in our house to resolve some weirdness in our den and kitchen. When we bought the house, there were three back doors: one from our laundry room, one in the kitchen, and an eight foot sliding glass door in our den. Our laundry room was still sporting the old green linoleum that didn't get finished when we re-tiled the kitchen.

From the outside our sliding glass door wasn't so pretty. The door was original to the house (built in the 60s) and was not very weatherproof. It fogged up when the heat was on and it was cold out, it fogged up when it was hot out and the A/C was on, so you can tell it was really thin glass.

Because of the way our den is structured we ended up putting our couch up against the door and pretending it was a window.

Here is the linoleum. Isn't it lovely? I mean, you can't get better than this yellow and green cobblestone design.

This is what my den looked like while the renovations were going on, with my washer and dryer in the living room. It was not fun to have everything everywhere, but we did it.

We decided to remove the back door in the laundry room and replace it with a window. My mom had torn a window out at her house and so we snatched it up and used it here. Charlie decided to put down the door himself, but he didn't want to continue the complicated brick pattern I had chosen for the kitchen, so I told him he could just do straight lines.

The den sliding glass door was replaced with two windows and a picture window in the middle. The contractor framed out the space and insulated the wall so we could keep the temperature a little more consistent.

We also wanted to replace the old door between the kitchen and laundry room, so we got one at Home Depot.


I mixed some paint together that was leftover and painted the walls. I also slapped three coats of white paint onto the shelves over the washer and dryer to make everything look nicer.


I was happy that we had some den paint leftover from the first time we painted the den and was able to easily cover the new drywall. It looks so much better than with the door there and I like the way the picture window looks in the middle.

We found some small accent tiles to fit them across the threshold between the two rooms. The whole project turned out so well and Charlie discovered that he liked putting down tile, which I was glad to hear since we have two bathrooms that are going to need tile eventually.

It was several weeks of construction and we were rushing to get it all done for both the homestudy and a house appraisal. We are so glad it is finished and I love that our laundry room looks so nice now. There is a nice flow between the two rooms and our white washer looks nice against the paint color. I am still working on getting some window treatments for both rooms to finish out the project, but I was sidetracked by getting the nursery done.