Taking up the floor of the laundry room was a pretty painless process.  using a pry bar and a hammer I was able to make quick work of the floor.  There were actually two layers of it, the top being these fake tiles, and the bottom being standard linoleum.  I’ll use some adhesive remover to take care of the black adhesive, and get back to bare concrete.

Someday I’ll get a nice finishing room for all my wood working projects, until then this make shift spray booth in my basement will have to do.  I first tried painting the doors all by hand, but this caused immense amounts of frustration as I tried to hold them, and paint them at the same time.  So I thought I’d give spraying them a shot.  I fired up my trusty beast of a compressor added a bit of water to the regular latex paint to thin it a bit and went to town.  Spraying them worked fantastically, I got a nice even finish and it was painless.  It did take a few more coats though, I think I did four in all.

I started painting the cabinets in November, and it took a good month and a half.  Mostly this was because going to school three nights a week meant I wanted to spend my weekends relaxing rather than painting.    Still, painting the cabinets was also alot of work, first they needed a good cleaning with TSP (Tri-Sodium Phosphate) to remove years of accumulated dirt and grease.  Then they got a light sanding to clean em up some more, and give the paint a key.  I also modified the far cabinet that had shelves on both sides, to only have shelves on the near side, so that the the other side could be used for brooms and mops.  With that done, I put on a coat of primer, and then two coats of paint.  If this was in a kitchen, or the cabinets were of better quality, I would also give them a coat of poly or two to protect them, but I’m not bothering with these.

I actually started this project back in November, but between the holidays and class I’ve been making slow progress, and haven’t gotten around to posting about it till now.  The laundry room in our house is in a rather sorry state.  The washer and dryer looked ok when we bought the house 2.5 years ago, but the washer conked out a few months ago and was replaced with a nice front loading Bosch that we’ve been happy with.  The rest of the room is quite awful though.  The cabinets are a kind of ugly green stain, the floor is  made of these fake-tile things, the sink faucet leaks and the walls are covered in a very dated green plaid.  Even more disturbing is that the wallpaper is sticky to the touch.

So everything is getting ripped out.  The cabinets are going to be painted and  the little counter top will be replaced with a nice cherry one.   The wallpaper will be stripped, the flooring taken up and the sink will be chucked.   We’ll also put in a new light fixture, since I broke the glass one a few months ago.  As or the laundry machines, I’m going to work around them until its time to do the floor, and then move them out and hopefully get the floor in quickly, before we run out of clean underwear.