• August 30, 2024

Evanston Mansion Renovation – Laundry and Guest Bath

Take a tour this beautiful 128-year-old Evanston mansion before we begin the renovation process. 

In this episode we admire the original wall of cabinetry clearly built on site to match the angles of the upper level ceiling. And our jaw drops a little at the 1990s tile overload and oddly angled sconces and mirror of the guest bathroom.

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

We’re here in the historic Lakeshore District, a few blocks from the lake in front of a beautiful limestone mansion. I thought it would be a great time for us to just take a look at the house in its current condition and talk a little bit about the scope and what we’re planning to do next.

We’re in a big linen closet and these cabinets are original to the house and they were built on site here. They weren’t built somewhere else and brought in and the reason why we know that is because these doors perfectly match the slope of the roof. What we plan to do with this room is we’re going to keep this run of cabinets because they’re just beautiful. The hardware is gorgeous. They’re made to fit the slope of this roof – but this second floor does not have laundry and that is something that this client really feels strongly that they’d like to try and achieve and we think we can do it by eliminating the cabinets on this side. It’s going to involve stealing some space from an adjacent bathroom and we’ll go there next to look, but that bathroom is remarkably big and has the space to give in order for us to do a side-by-side washer and dryer and then all the linen storage that you would normally want in a laundry room is conveniently here already built-in.

We have transported back to 1990 as you can tell by the tile. This room is going to receive what we call a facelift, and so, by facelift we mean that we’re going to get rid of all this tile, we’re going to replace this kooky tub, we’re going to put a new vanity in that actually has some storage and we’re going to replace the toilet but not change the location. We’re also going to work on lighting in this room because right now we have sconces and they’re mounted to a sloped wall which is a little bit weird so we’re going to work on making that improvement.

As you can see this is a really really big space and so the idea with the laundry room is to bring this wall in probably only about six inches or so. We’re going to do a built-in tub shower here that our plumbing is going to run on a wall that’s here, which will give us a nice sort of natural place for this door to rest against and it’ll allow us to steal that space, get a laundry room proximate to where we already have plumbing and fingers crossed we’ll get that to work.