By Caroline Tahana
We won our laundry week on The Block so the expectations for our own home laundry will be pretty high! I love to clean and to be organised. I hate to cook believe it or not, Kingi is the cook in our household so when kitchen week comes around, I might get him to blog for us!
In the last two properties we have owned as a family, the laundries were outside. Growing up in my family home, our laundry was always inside. So the great debate begins! Kingi likes the outside laundry whereas I prefer one inside. I think having an outside laundry actually creates more dirt on the clothes and can damage them, whereas Kingi thinks an outside laundry is great for ventilation and less noise. But again I ask…who does the laundry in your house anyway? My point exactly! ME! So after months of arguing I finally won this round! Inside laundry it is!
Now when planning the new position of the laundry, where do you put it? Near the bedrooms so you can access the rooms quickly to put clothes away? Or will that be too noisy? These are the questions you need to discuss when renovating your family home. We want to position it somewhere that’s going to be close to the outside clothes line and also in an area that isn’t wasting space.
When planning a laundry just like I did on The Block, my main goal was to be practical. Think about what you need to do in a laundry. What do you want to store? Will you have a washer and a dryer? In our new renovation, we won’t be having a dryer as we live in North Queensland so that’s our dryer! But we will be having two washing machines. With Kingi’s uniforms always being covered in render, I knew from the start of these renovations that we would be having two!
I want to make sure that there is enough storage for everything: brooms, mops and buckets! This space is purely practical. It isn’t a space the whole family will be spending a lot of time in so don’t overdo it. The laundry shouldn’t take a big chunk out of your budget either. Pick some cheaper tiles than what you would use in your bathroom. Your guests won’t be using your laundry so you don’t need to impress anyone here! But the one component I would spend a bit more money on would be your cabinetry. I would recommend storage with doors, you want to hide all those cleaning bottles! Our laundry will also include a massive sink. We got big points for this on The Block! You need to be able to wash a small dog in there and to be able to soak any sheets (mums, I know you hear me on this one!)
If you’re about to tackle some renovations at home, I would always suggest starting in the laundry. It’s a great area to learn and make any little mistakes in. No one will really see this area too much so if you make a bad choice then it’s really not going to affect the whole house. Doing a laundry first will also teach you the process of what’s involved in a “wet area” and this will be a great learning experience before you tackle your bathrooms!
Caro and Kingi’s top tips this week:
- Plan your storage solutions – Think about what you have in your laundry now and how you want to store it better.
- Pick cheaper tiles – I would recommend neutral colours as they are normally cheaper.
- Research online – you can save heaps when buying online! We recommend www.renovatorstore.com.au
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