Retro Renovation» laundry and mud room

My Ikea hack: Work bench made from Ikea Trofast storage units

pam kueber — Wed, 28 Mar 2012 15:50:57 +0000

Here is a recipe for a (relatively) cheap, cheerful and effective work bench or crafting work space: Take two of these Ikea Trofast children’s storage frames… butt them together low-end to low-end… fill them with the Ikea plastic bins… top with a ready-made laminate countertop, or order a design you like, or use a Ikea Numerar countertop (perfectly sized, several design options)… and voila: A nifty work space with tons of handy storage. The Trofast frame stands 36″ high at its highest level, so with the countertop, it’s just a tad higher than a standard kitchen counter — a good working height, I think, if you are at least 5’6″ tall or so.

The idea in real life (mine):

Okay, so the photo above is not super pretty. This is my husband’s work area wedged into a small tool room in our basement. He is an absolute neatnik — I take blame for that mess in the middle; if I were a prouder blogger, I’d clean it up for this photo. Although, I guess you could say: This is real. The reason I even thought to do this story about our Ikea work bench hack is that, with ideas buzzing for my office makeover, I went and communed for a while with this whole set up to consider whether I just straight-out copy it into my office-turned-office/craft room. I dragged DH into the discussion, and he agrees: This tool room work bench — which uses two Trofast children’s toy storage units that we purchased from Ikea 13 years ago — is the best ever. His words.

The Trofast’s pine frame — at least the one we purchased circa 1998 — is impressively sturdy, indestructible, even. From the photos online today it looks the same — construction quality does not appear to have changed. The plastic bins are lightweight but strong. They slide in and out just like drawers, and you can take them all the way out, and tote them where you need to use them — this would be good in a craft room.

Ikea has a variety of other shapes and sizes of this Trofast storage units that use this same pine-frame-with-plastic-drawers design concept — lots of pieces to potentially combine into creative systems of stuff to hold your stuff ugh. However, I do wish that Ikea had a design as deep (18″) and high (36″) as the Trofast, but with drawers that went all the way to the top so that the big mess-in-the-middle, when used according to my design would not occur; alas they do not. If I actually do this in my craft room, I will have to hack the hack to fix the gap.

Will I replicate this world’s best workbench for my office craft area? Maybe, maybe not. I need to explore every goshdarn potential solution until my eyes bug out. I still may need to do the craft room all vintage, The Hard Way. Ideas still buzzing.

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7 laundry sinks from Kohler — cast iron beauties

pam kueber — Tue, 27 Mar 2012 08:30:27 +0000

The cast iron laundry room sinks by Kohler: Gorgeous. And I discovered 7 of them — available in a wide variety of colors and faucet configurations — to ogle. Yes: Laundry room porn. You could also use these sinks in your utility room, mudroom, potting area or craft room.

The chief difference between a kitchen sink and laundry room sink is that the latter is deeper — usually 12″, sometimes even more. I love these Kohler designs because they are cast iron, finished with porcelain enamel (like our kitchen sink favorite, the Kohler Delafield). The real, old fashioned deal. Among the seven designs, some have an early 20th century feel, like the Kohler Harborview sink, above. It’s a 48″ wide behemoth that comes in either a one- or two-faucet configuration.

Others cast iron sinks in the lineup have a more midcentury look, like the Kohler Bayview sink, above. You can also get this one with a faucet hole on top.

Yes, this one makes me wish I had a space for a floor sink. I guess I would use it to give Astro showers? The Kohler Oceanview sink is 48″ wide and 7″ deep. It can also be installed as a countertop sink. I love cast iron sinks.

This Kohler Park Falls sink might actually be the most practical for the space I have in mind for my crafting sink. It’s only 21″ front to back. This one is tile-in. The Park Falls also comes with a countertop drop-in design.

The Kohler River Falls is similarly sized. All these sinks seem to be available in a variety of colors and hole and mounting configurations. If you are truly interested, study and compare all the specifications and features carefully. ‘Til your eyes bug out.

The Glen Falls is about the same, compact size as well. Kohler also offers a few under-counter cast iron utility sinks.

The Kohler Tandem laundry sink is contemporary and cute as a button. It comes with a variety of accessories so that you can wash your delicates more easily.

Can these also be used as kitchen sinks? Be careful: My experience with very deep kitchen sinks is that they are back-breakers. It’s okay to have a deep utility sink — it gives you lots of depth to wash out buckets as well as all your other tools. But if you were to use a sink like this in the kitchen, you would sort of have to “bend down” to get to the bottom all the time. So, check the depth of the sink you are considering. Note: The Harborview (first sink shown) is “only 10″ deep; that would be fine for a kitchen, I think.

I have heard of folks putting kitchen sinks in the bathroom — so they give the babies their baths. Hmmm…. Juust wash the baby in the kitchen sink — that’s what we did.

Finally, don’t flip out too much at the retail prices you see on the Kohler website. Just tapping around the www a bit, I see these marketed at 50% less at major online retailers. It pays to shop around — assuming you get the customer service required.

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3 ideas to create a gingham plaid laundry room floor

pam kueber — Tue, 30 Nov 2010 11:00:26 +0000

I recently asked readers if they could help find a plaid floor for Bernadette’s laundry room similar to the one in the photo at the right. In my online searching, I had come up empty handed, and I offered a bounty — a prize from my secret treasure chest — to the reader with the best idea. Lots of readers contributed ideas, and in the end, I decided it was a three-way tie. Here are the two ideas that, I think, would mimic the look of that 1990′s vinyl sheet tile in the photo.

1. Create a plaid design using floor tile: The first comment ka-boom was from Sarah, and she is the first co-winner. She suggested:

I don’t know of anything contemporary, but there is a bathroom floor in my mom’s house exactly like this! It’s achieved with 3 sizes of ceramic tile. (The house was built in 1937 but it may have been fixed up about 10 years later). I’m not sure how pleasant that would be in a kitchen, though (although I have seen tiles that small in kitchens before).

Sarah, I agree that a gingham tile floor in a kitchen might be a bit much — unless the kitchen were “small and sweet.” And also: What a lot of grout to try and keep clean. But in a laundry room — it could be just fine, I think. I created the design shown up top on Dal-tile’s Mosaic Tile Design Tool using colors available in their 1″ tiles. You could also create a plaid mosaic design with a single field tile in the center — such as 4″ center circled by 2x4s at the side and 2x2s in the corner. The trick would be to find the colors you want in the sizes you want…

2. Paint a plaid floor: Over the Retro Facebook fan page, Della pointed to this link from Martha Stewart, in which: painting expert Eve Ashcraft explains how to paint a gingham floor. Ummm, she makes it sound and look easier than I bet it would be… but if you’re handy, it would be a budget solution, to be sure.

3. Hunt for remnants at stores that have been around a while. Lynne makes it a hat trick (hey: sports lingo! hockey, even! can you believe it!) with my general favorite response to any “where can I find old stuff?” question. That is: Go to old timey flooring stores (or wallpaper stores / or plumbing supply stores / or electrical supply stores / or “fill in the blank” stores — and ask where their old stuff is. In the back? In the basement? In a storage shed? Tell ‘em you’ll go rifle through everything… Look what Lynne found, which she pointed to in her answer:

My suggestion would be for Bernadette to try the back corners of the remnant rooms at the small flooring stores. They can keep some pretty old stuff. I recently got a length of aqua and pink speckled inlaid vinyl for my laundry room for .50 a square foot. Six feet wide, and they had a huge roll of it, even in a few other colorways. I’m not sure where Bernadette lives, or how big of an area she is wanting to cover, but I can drive over and take a look-see what “Ralph’s Flooring Fashions” has to offer!

“Aqua and pink speckled inlaid vinyl?” Yeehaw! (Have a pro check the backing for asbestos, though, so’s you know what you have.) So get out there, Retro Renovators! There’s still a lot of great NOS stuff out there to be had!

Sarah, Della & Lynne: I’ll send you an email or direct message to get in touch so’s I can send you your treasure. Thanks, everyone, for your suggestions!

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