Be My Poor (wo)Man’s HGTV!

I’m house-challenged.  I mean, it’s not *just* that I have a teeny weeny itty bitty house (seriously, if you think yours is smaller? it’s not. try me).  But it’s also that we lack the skillz, the time, and the Benjamins to really get what there is of our home into the kind of shape we’d like.  One of our biggest challenges is that we only have one bathroom.  For our little family of three (only two of whom actually use the toilet so far) we’ve been fine.  But when guests come to visit and stay in our detached “guesthouse”… things get a bit dicey.

Enter the laundry room.

Laundry and Storage - great combo if you like everything to have a fluffy layer of lint on it!

Now this is an awesome space for a laundry room, and it’s an awesome space for extra storage. What we’d really like is for it to be an awesome space for a guest bathroom too.

Here’s the hitch.  We can’t put a toilet in here.  We called up a plumber who looked at the place and said it really wasn’t worth the money.  It’d cost thousands of dollars to hook into our sewer sufficiently for a toilet, and in the end we wouldn’t be able to do it with permits so we run the risk of having to take it all out anyway.  not smart, in his opinion. and we respected his opinion.

So. That leaves us with the option I’d originally vetoed. A… *sigh* composting toilet.  I made Masa promise me it wouldn’t smell like an outhouse in our laundry room.  But in the end, it’s really the only way short of adding onto our house.  And we just don’t have the money for that.

So here’s where I need me some HGTV watchers to weigh in.  I want to do the following things:

1) clean and paint walls and window frames

2) get stacking HE washer and dryer and put them next to the window, here:

I'm thinking I want to take down that cabinet and put the stackers there.

3) put the composting toilet under the window (and put up a window covering of course). this toilet thing still makes me cringe, anyone have a success story???

4) install closing cabinets in the back there where the shelves are now.

5) install a utility sink with a cabinet underneath, cabinets above, and possibly a new mirror. Here’s how that area looks now:

why someone put a tiny bathroom vanity sink in the laundry room is beyond me. if nothing else, I want to change this out for a utility sink.

See, problem is, I’ve got lots of ideas but I have no clue how hard (read: impossible) any of this might be, I don’t know if we can do some of it ourselves or if we’re going to have to shell out money for someone else to do it.

I kind of look at it as a practice run for if we ever wanted to do anything inside our house.  If we mess this area up, it’s not like it was awesome to begin with right?

So anyway, here’s my appeal.  If you have any advice garnered from having done these types of things yourself, or if you have any awesome ideas or if you see any fatal flaws in my logic or planning, please PLEASE speak up!!  I am excited to start this project but I know how these things go and about 6 minutes into it we’re going to be asking ourselves what the EFF we were thinking.

So it’d be nice to hear some inspiration (or reality checks, as the case may be!) Just pretend that you’re an awesome handyperson and that we met in the parking lot at the Home Depot. ok?

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