potty style

Our house didn't sell this summer (60+ showing and not even a nibble, though this isn't a terrible thing seeing as I don't have a new job yet), so we decided its time to do a couple more low cost projects.

Last week we got a new AC and a new furnace. This is actually horribly not at all low cost, but since the AC died a painful death of mechanical failure and all short of blowing up, we didn't have a lot of options. (I tell myself no one wants to buy a house with a broken central air unit. I really really like having central air and the several weeks with one noisy window unit reminded me how much I ENJOY central AC!). Sadly, this turned out to not be a lightening issue and to be rather costly...oh well. I like to think NEW AC AND FURNACE will look good in our house ad next year. If it makes the house sell two months faster, we've more than made the money back on the mortgage, so even though this is impossible to quantify, I'll tell myself when it does sell it would have been 2+ months longer without this improvement!

But I digress from the low cost improvements.

First, we started closing off our spare toilet.  What possessed the builders of our 1957 neighborhood to include a toilet, but not a bathroom, in the utility area, I will never know. Some of our neighbors have closed in the toilet to a (sort of) half bath, and our Realtor advised us this would likely help our traffic and such when we relist, so we bit the bullet. Originally, I wanted to enclose our furnace and water heater and make the remainder of the area a larger bath/laundry room, with a door to a "storage area" (this weird narrow area that is closed off from our garage by a cinder-block wall for some also unknown reason). I should draw a picture of this layout for you, but its kind of irrelevant since we can't do it since there's a drainpipe exactly where the washer/dryer needs to go and the furnace is too far out to enclose without moving the door to the room. I suppose this explains why I am not aware of any neighbors who've gone this particular route.

Anyway. Now that you have all of these details to explain what you're about to see....

Chris working on the framing...and can we figure out why orange was a good idea for the toilet area?? The rest of the utility room is white!

I was standing in the door to take this photo, so you see how there's not a ton of space to deal with here. There's a utility sink to the left of the new left wall. And to the left of the toilet (if you were sitting on it), a giant duct for the air/heat. Sadly, I missed taking a true Before photo with the curtain surrounding the toilet. For an amusing fact in the history of our house, the utility area formerly had western style swinging half doors...nothing like a half door and a curtain when you're pooping! We installed a louver door a while ago, but it was still kind of...open. And dark behind the curtain!

My parents came to visit this weekend, and as usual we put them to work (well, my dad mostly. And we did go out to lunch this time!).  We moved the outlet for the washer & dryer outside of the new toilet enclosure, added a light and a switch, and changed the light for the utility area from a pull string to a switch.

switches! new outlet location! a second louver door to shield your bottom!

We're still on the fence about a sink in there. We found a tiny one with a cabinet, which is currently living in the garage. But piping it in will be a fiasco, since in the words of my dad, the utility sink was "jerry rigged in". I am torn if a sink inside the toilet closet will be worth the work when the utility sink is, well, right outside of it. Would you care as a homebuyer? Notice even? Its not like this is a lux bathroom missing a sink!