I am about to say something that may jinx this project altogether, but writers gotta write. Here goes: I am on schedule. So far, all of the work has been straightforward with no surprises. Also, I have every task assigned and planned.
This level of organization is not very Stacy-like, but as I mentioned before, the One Room Challenge deadline looms, and so does my friend’s baby shower on May 25. BHH is the venue. After the end of the ORC, we have to immediately refinish the living room floors leaving at least a one-week buffer so that they can cure. It’s a tight deadline, but it is happening.
Before I recap week three, let’s talk about the design.
Laundry/Office Design Plan
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Lately, I’ve realized that I am very good at keeping plans in my head but not so good at putting them down on paper and sharing them. At its core, the ORC is a design challenge, so I enlisted the help of my friend, Dale. It turns out that he is a SketchUp wizard. He plugged all of my ideas into the program first. Then, we sat down for about an hour-and-a-half to hammer out some of the additional details. Ignore all of the colors, but here is a basic rendering of the laundry side of the room. All mistakes are my own. Dale was a patient teacher.
Those green boxes on top represent a soffit. The electrician will install four of these lights across the front of it. At $27.13 per fixture, they are a steal! Shout-out to my local Instagram-turned-RL friend Crystal for pointing me in the right direction. I was looking for something classic, schoolhousish, and under $50. Mission accomplished.
The cabinets underneath the soffit will be open shelving, but I will hide the contents with fabric curtains. I ordered three half-yard pieces from Rifle Paper Co.’s Wildwood line. I am not sure which one I will choose yet.
The lower left cabinet will be a regular one with doors. That is where we will keep our overflow recycling and laundry detergent. For the open space on the left side of the washer, I ordered this rolling hamper.
The office side of the room is still in flux, but hopefully, this gives you an idea of the overall direction of the laundry/office.
Here are the rest of the highlights from week three.
Painting
The laundry/office is painted! First, it was going to be white. Then, two days later, I changed my mind. Making a complete 180, I painted the room Mount Etna by Sherwin-Williams. It’s dark and a little dramatic, and I love it.
I have started to paint the trim, but I cannot install it until all of the cabinets are in place.
Cabinets
Speaking of cabinets, my visit to Lowe’s yesterday was not very productive. For some reason, as soon as I saw all of the choices, I became overwhelmed, and I could not buy anything. My new plan is to measure everything again and head back to Lowe’s by the weekend.
Dale and I will be building the upper cabinet directly under the soffit. We will also have to make something on the office side since there is a window in the way of a regular-height base cabinet. The exact solution is TBD, but we better put a rush on that since we are coming close to rolling on the downhill slope of this challenge.
Electrical Work
Yesterday, I met with the electrician, and I am waiting for his bid. The room has a bit of suspect knob and tube wiring and “updated” Romex. I put the word updated in quotes because the last upgrades were probably completed in the 1950s. The plan is to terminate the old stuff and rewire for new stuff. That’s the very technical explanation. As it all shakes out, I will explain in-depth. The company I called has already done quite a bit of work for BHH. They know old houses, and we are in good hands.
By next week, I plan to have all of the trim painted, the cabinets purchased and primed, and have the soffit built for the electricians — no big deal. I kid. It’s a big darn deal. That means I need to get off this computer and start working.
Please make sure to visit the One Room Challenge blog to see all of the week three updates from the featured design influencers and the other guest participants like us. There are over 300 projects to entertain and inspire.
Now, I want to know what you think. Did you get whiplash following the painting saga on Instagram? I keep trying to be a different person, but at this stage in life, I have settled hard into who I am. I continue to be a “leap, and the net will appear” kind of gal.
9 Comments
Claire
Looks great! I’m curious about the shelf over the washing machine controls, is that going to come out over the controls at all, or are your machines away from the wall (like mine are) due to plumbing, etc.? I always worried about adding a shelf because I felt like the controls would be in shadow, but maybe the electrician can stick some rope lights in there!
Stacy
Thank you, Claire. The shelf won’t come out far enough to cast a shadow. I am just not that great at SketchUp. 🙂 You are correct that the gap is due to the plumbing and vent.
Em
I’m impressed! Kudos on making so much progress already! I too get overwhelmed at Lowe’s and often have to make a return trip.
Stacy
Two trips, three, four… 😀
Emy
I love the paint color! And the name even more. I lived near Mt Etna for a few years, so every time I see this paint color, I want it.
Your progress is wonderful and inspiring. I’m hoping to make some major progress myself this weekend.
Stacy
You have such a neat connection to the color! I have never seen Mount Etna, but I hope to one day. Good luck this week! You’ve got this.
Jeri
It is looking wonderful! I am loving the dark, dramatic walls. I also love the white background material for the curtains but have no idea which will look the best. I enjoy watching the progress!
Stacy
Thank you, Jeri!
Ragnar
I’ll try to give a very quick non-technical overview of the history of electrical wiring.
As you’ll probably know, wires are made of metal because that conducts electricity. In order to make sure the electricity only goes where it’s supposed to (otherwise it woouldn’t do anything useful but kill people and burn everything down instead) wires need to be insulated, i.e. covered with something that does NOT conduct electricity at all.
In the early days, well into the 1950s, the insulation material of choice was rubber. It’s a great isolator but not very sturdy, so it was usually covered with some kind of fabric for added strength. To make absolutely sure the wires didn’t touch anything they weren’t supposed to, early electricians strung the wires between little porcelain knobs and threaded them through porcelain tubes where they passed through joists, studs, etc. That’s called knob & tube wiring for obvious reasons. It’s technically still fine, or rather would be if it wasn’t for the rubber aging and becoming even less stable than it was when it was new. Especially when the wires are overloaded or near light bulbs they become hot and the rubber perishes rapidly. Knob & tube wiring is usually from before WWII so it’s well past it’s best-before date. If not disturbed it might last another decade or two without setting the house on fire but if you have the chance to replace it, do it!
As stringing individual wires from knob to knob is a lot of work, the industry came up with the idea of combining multiple wires inside a common sheath made of rubber, fabric, metal or PVC, a cable. Usually there’s also some kind of filler around the individual round wires to give the outer sheath a nicer shape and make it easier to remove. The filler can be paper, jute, sisal or rubber. Early cables also have rubber-insulated wires, which means they suffer from the same issues as knob & tube. Matters are made worse because the wires are closer together. K&T has up to a foot of distance between the individual wires, so even if one became completely bare it wouldn’t touch any other wires and short-circuit. In a cable, the individual cores are fairly close to each other and can touch, possibly starting a fire. So early cable isn’t great to keep around either.
Then there’s the touchy subject of grounding. A normal household supply has two wires, one that has 120 or 230 or whatever volts “to ground”, i.e. for example measured to a long metal spike driven into the earth outside, and one has zero volts to ground because it’s connected to just such a spike at the power substation or the transformer outside your house. The wire with 120 or 230 V is called the “hot” or “live” or “line”, the 0 V is the “neutral”. If someone touches the live while also touching something connected to earth (the actual ground outside, a metal water pipe partly buried in the ground, the neutral wire, etc.) current (electricity) will flow through that person’s body, possibly killing them. For that reason you want to make sure that no part of the electrical system that people can touch will ever become connected to the live wire.
There are different ways of achieving that. One popular method is having at least two sturdy layers of insulation around every live part, or at the very least one extra-solid layer. The assumption is that it’s unlikely both layers will fail at the same time without anyone noticing. Another method is making sure that the supply will be turned off automatically as soon as something that shouldn’t be live becomes live. That’s usually done by connecting that critical part to earth with a dedicated wire. As soon as a live wire touches that earthed metal part, a whole lot of electricity flows through that connection, tripping a breaker or RCD/GFI or blowing a fuse, hopefully before anyone happens to touch that metal part.
Knob & tube wasn’t earthed at all. The reasoning back then was that a wooden or linoleum floor was insulated well enough to prevent a lethal current flowing through someone’s body, even if touching a live part. The resulting shock still feels pretty nasty and once you introduce earthed water pipes, radiators and heating pipes or air ducts, you can no longer be sure there’s no danger. In some countries there is the option of adding a GFI/RCD to improve the safety of such ancient installations because that will at least trip – hopefully quickly enough – as someone touches the exposed live part and current starts to flow.
In the 1950s, earthing became required at least for rooms that had water pipes (kitchens, laundry rooms, bathrooms). That was done by adding an earth wire to the cables but since this wire isn’t supposed to carry electricity for longer periods of time, just the fractions of a second until the fuse blows or the breaker trips, it was usually made thinner than the other wires. Today the reasoning is that even those milliseconds could be enough to seriously overheat the earth and damage the other wires so in most countries it needs to be full-sized (the only exceptions I know are the UK and Norway).
Some countries also used metal-sheathed cables (BX in the US and Canada for example). If the sheath isn’t earthed they’re a danger themselves as the sheath might become live. Later the sheath was used as the earth wire, that requires proper connections every time the cable is spliced or connected to a switch, socket, light or whatever and the sheath was usually made of a metal that conducts electricity less well than copper so it didn’t equal a full-sized earth wire either. So most countries these days require a separate earth inside the metal sheath.
So basically any pre-1960s wiring is highly likely to have seen much better days and should be replaced. Newer wiring should be checked for bodges and improper repairs and is often undersized for modern demands, leading to power strips and extension leads being strung all over the place, which is at least a nuisance, in the worst case a fire waiting to happen.
So if you have any walls open or generally remodel a space, do yourself a favour and have an electrician look at it before you do any decorating!