• September 12, 2024

Evanston Mansion Renovation – Laundry Room and Guest Bath After Demo

We’ve opened one wall of an upstairs linen closet to make room for a washer and dryer. We’ll be keeping the original and beautiful built-in cabinetry and its hardware but will have to address a surprise in the load-bearing wall we are moving in to change up the guest bath on the other side of the wall.

Follow along!

• Episode 1 – Exterior and Foyer
• Episode 2 – Library and Family Room
• Episode 3 – Dining Room and Porch
• Episode 4 – Kitchen and Pantry
• Episode 5 – Stairwell and Landing
• Episode 6 – Primary Bedroom and Bathroom
• Episode 7 – Porch and Third Floor
• Episode 8 – Lower Level
• Episode 9 – Laundry and Guest Bath
• Episode 10 – Kitchen and Pantry After Demo
• Episode 11 – Primary Bath and Closet After Demo
• Episode 12 – Laundry and Guest Bath After Demo
• Episode 13 – Third Floor After Demo
• Episode 14 – Temporary Primary Bedroom

Transcript

Welcome back to the Evanston Mansion Renovation Series, where we are now in the demolition phase.

So I’m standing in what used to be a giant linen closet. We talked in one of the last videos about these cabinets. We believe if they’re not original to the house they’re certainly very, very old and in great condition. What we’ve decided to do is to take out this side of the built-in cabinets and we’re going to take this wall and we’re going to eventually demolish it. It’s a bearing wall right now, which is why it’s still standing, and we’re going to shift it over about 15 inches.

And what that will allow us to do is make a really big bathroom smaller and make a linen closet that was too small to accommodate a washer and dryer wide enough so that we can do that. We’re going to do countertops on top so that place for laundry baskets, folding, things like that. And we’re going to keep this great window.

So we’re now in the hall bath. As you can see we’ve done some partial demolition in here. Part of the reason why we still have plaster here and nothing here is because this is where that really 1990s bad, bad, bad tile was. So we’ve pulled all of that off. We’ve also taken all the finish off of this wall so we could understand what was running through it because this is going to be moving in 15 inches.

There was a gigantic, very oddly shaped tub here before. Our new design now is going to be a shower, standing shower. Toilet is going to stay in the same location. New sink cabinet is going to be here.

We’re on the second floor now but this house has a mansard roof on it. So there’s a lot of areas like we’ve seen in the primary closet, primary bathroom, where depending on what’s happening with the roof, that’s being expressed on the inside of the house. So what you see here in terms of slope is going to stay. We’re just going to make some improvements to the lighting.

Part of demolition is the unexpected. So when we demolished all the finished work in the cabinet in the linen closet that’s now going to become a laundry room, we recognized then that there was a bearing wall in place.

We had to do a little tracing to figure out what was happening with the existing structure. Sometimes, then, we have to cut holes in rooms that we had no intention of touching at all to determine what the existing structure was. And I’ll be honest with you, I’m kind of glad we cut this hole because we learned that there’s a beam here and it’s totally undersized.

So in addition to putting in a new beam for the bearing wall that we’re moving, we’re now expanding our scope into this space to take care of an existing problem.

If you’ve missed any episodes of this incredible journey, go back and watch from the beginning.