Laundry Room Project that I wasn't planning on doing.

Sometimes in life, your children help you to decide that this project needs to get done now. My son went to summer camp with his Boy Scout Troop, and being a good scout, he had a pocket knife in his pocket for emergencies....wink wink!. Anyhow, like most boys, they don't know how to empty their pockets, and I ran his clothes through the laundry when he got home because, well, it was camp and they smelled. If you have a front loader, I'm guessing you know what happened. The pocket knife opened up and cut a hole in the rubber seal. That means there was water leaking everywhere, and I would need to repair the washing machine, with it on the bottom, which means time to unstack them. If I'm going to unstack them to repair, I might as well pull up the flooring and lay tile while I'm at it, right?

So step one was to unstack them and take apart the washer so I could order the parts. Now, while I am waiting for the snail mail to ship the part, I started on the flooring. Off to Floor and Decor I went because I knew I wanted a plain white tile, so this was going to be my best bet.

Now we have our laundry room upstairs, which means it's not on the concrete, so laying tile floors on the plywood means a little prep work. Before you can lay tile on plywood, you need to install an underlayer that allows the tile to move with the wood, thus not allowing it to break. It's easy to lay, you just have to use the same mortar that you would lay tile with. The trick is to push down really hard so that there is good contact with the material.

This room is really small, so it didn't take long to lay this tile, plus there weren't to many cuts that needed to be made with the tile, so it went down quickly.

I decided that for a baseboard, I would use tile instead of wood in this room, as there is water in this room. I took the tile and cut it 3 inches high, and then, using the tile tape, applied it to the wall before I grouted. I chose white grout for this room, something I learned that is important to remember when grouting is that on ALL changes in planes, you need to use chalk and not grout.

Once everything was grouted, it was easy from there. The part for the washer came in, and I installed the rubber seal. YouTube is your friend when you're doing repair work like that, and then restacked the washer drying, and it was like the leak never happened. So sometimes you have to thank your children for creating more work for you, because this was a project I had been wanting to do for a long time, and he forced me to do it, and I couldn't be happier with how it turned out.