(unrelated but happy birthday for the other day - i'm pretty sure i just missed it, i remember thinking i should send you a msg thru fitbit but i don't think i actually did it - i miss our little group too, IDK why google thought ditching them was a good idea! Anyway, I hope you and Mei are good!)
Thank you for the birthday greeting. It was June 5th. Yeah, I miss the Fitbit group too. They said it was so they had room for new stuff but alas nothing new has shown up. Mei is good. She graduated from college and is starting a new degree in the fall -- associates in baking and pastry arts. Most of her general ed and nutrition classes will transfer so she just needs to take the actual baking classes. I am doing okay. My dad has had health issues since March so things have been unsettled. We have also been traveling a lot since hubby retired. Otherwise, doing well.
Unfortunately the wall is damp to the point where the cupboard gets mould . We have tried taking the skirting board of to get it air, but it needs to be properly damp proofed. We live in a terraced house, but that wall is partly a garden wall in the neighbour house,and there are plants up against part of it. It was offices before,but now have been empty for 2 years, so no maintenance,and no one to scoop pooling water away from the walls. So we will have to pull the cabinets out,and damp proof with some special stuff. Also my cabinets have faded unevenly over the years,so we have decided to give them a colour instead of the varnished wood . It is the wall tiles he won't change,and yes they have the Still life design tiles too.... Since he is doing all of it himself,and since he just got over a bad long bout of bronchitis,and has "cool" I am not pushing it.... but it does make our colour choices harder.
Hubby and I are shower people too and the kids are shower people for the most part, but every once in a while my boys will want a tub soak still. Every though I hate baths, I would totally make sure to have at least one tub in the house too, because sometime you just need one, especially like you said with small kiddos. You totally made the right decision even if you never use it! Stinks about the towel bar, but we've had the same thing happen at our house... but nobody knows who broke it. Lol. Kids! I also love the idea of a dual shower head!
Damp is a nightmare; it sounds like with a garden there and knowing the situation on the otherside of the wall you don't have any other choice really, sorry about that. Maybe painting the tiles as well as the cabinets is your best compromise; i stopped wishing for 'perfect' and settling for 'better' several years back, small improvements can go a long way to making us feel better about a space (and sorry this reply took so long Vivi - it was in one of about a million open tabs on my computer and apparently i never hit 'post reply' )
Love the reno! Question: How is your dryer mounted on the ceiling? Or is it just upside down on a shelf? I've never seen that before, but it's such a cool space saving idea! Also, love the kitchen photos. Since the ceiling is a mess, we are debating how much to take on right now. And your kitchen is similar in size to mine! At least in the layout you showed.
I think it's pretty common here hanging the dryer ( I know my sister in her current & previous rented unit/apartment has hers hanging & the unit and then house I've lived in since Uni were the same because of internal water heaters taking up laundry space). DH hung my mum's in her current place in 2018 or 2019 & it's become a running joke to see how frequently she still mentions that the dryer is still on the wall, because it was every phone call initially, as if it's suspended there by magic defying gravity, not by purpose built brackets etc. If we didn't have a chest freezer (DH cut & piano hinged the laundry bench so we could still use it) there'd be more floor space for a dryer ( which I really only use if we have several days of rain). I believe the 'mounting bracket' is pretty universal; there's 'holes' or slots really in the back of the dryer for it to hook on the bracket to hang & I want to say the bracket is actually in the box with the dryer & this extra sticker/magnet to go over the panel so you don't have to read all the settings upside down but a lot is printed on it both upside down & right way up, but we've had it for like a decade so I don't really remember. Most of the (US) Reno shows we've seen they're either side by side or stacked one on top of the other but I thought appliances were meant to have more airflow between them & not operate on the same circuit here if used simultaneously to avoid overload, i just don't run both at the same time but anyway here's kind of a photo of the side hanging. The timber/wood bolted to the wall was there when we moved in from the previous owne'rs dryer & we just reused it & yes sometimes it bugs me the dryer is offset to the washer position but the alignment wasn't worth getting plumbing moved etc for us to fix it. Hope that helps?
I absolutely love how your renovation turns out! It looks so amazing! Gave me some inspo on my own renovation ideas too, thanks!
see what i can do up, sewer connection in wall behind vanity leak. have no sewer piping under vanity, plaster cut out going down stairs to basement, he has decided call plumber. house built in the 30s
That is so fascinating @bellbird ! I have never seen a hanging dryer. Clearly, I need to travel more! Here, the dryer has it's own breaker/fuse in the box separate from the washer, but they are still both on the floor for the most part. There are stackable ones, like you said. I don't know if they are made special for airflow? But they are sold as stackable. So, my current washer and dryer I wouldn't stack since they weren't intended that way. I love finding out all the different things that seem so normal in other parts of the world.
Your reno looks awesome. Although that hanging dryer is the stuff that short person nightmares are made of. lol
i know they have combo 'washer & dryer in 1 machines' but they're so pricey and both ours still work (although i have broken the door handle on our washer twice now and if we didn't have the bench and laundry reno already done, i'm pretty sure DH would have said 'that's it, we're going back to a top loader', instead he's already bought a third handle for when i stuff it the next time - not sure if that's sweet and smart or says something else but anyway, i don't know that i could reach the panel if the dryer was stacked right way up on top of the washer... I don't know if it's because my avatar bird makes me look like a giant but i'm only about 5 foot 2 - or 160cm if you speak metric; my teenage kids overtook me a while ago but the upside down-ness is really handy actually; i can still reach inside and find random socks and such; like i said to Courtney, i don't think i could reach if they were stacked. And i like the extra bench space that gap in the middle provides. The hanging rack that has the big rectangular plastic container on it usually has a normal laundry bucket up the top next to it that i use to soak microfibre cloths and such and to reach it, i use one of the coat hangers and hook it's handle to pull it down (empty of course) because going back into the dining room to get a chair is like an extra minute I can't be bothered with! And given how all the organiser peep's talk about using the vertical space with respect to storage and all and really i don't use it all that often, it's not a nightmare - i have a theory that all short-ish people have good legs from doing calf raises so regularly to reach stuff; better than me hunching to see in the dryer; squatting to pack and unpack the washer is enough but still easier than i remember reaching the wet socks at the bottom of our old top loader being! i have joked that if i ever go missing it's because i fell in the chest freezer trying to reach something at the bottom, i used to say the same about the top loader!
My friend can totally relate to this!!! Her floor tiles in her bathroom and laundry rooms have a glaze on them that when viewed from the doorway makes portions of all the tiles look wet, like there was a big flood in there. Viewed straight on, you don't notice that effect. She has gotten used to it, but it freaks out the guests.
