When the house was being built, we weren’t able to travel the 300+ miles to check on how things were coming along as often as we would have liked. Because of that, it was always somewhat distressing when we made it down here and found mistake after mistake. Most of the mistakes weren’t huge (although a few were), but they were all irritating. And unfortunately, not all of them were able to be corrected - which is still irritating, but I’m getting used to them.
We have a nice little laundry room, aka our mud room, and also where the dogs are fed. It’s the passage between the garage and the house. There is a small half bath (toilet and sink, which is a large laundry sink – very handy!) attached to it.
Now that you have the layout of our laundry room, I can explain the problem we identified on one of our trips. Because it is a fairly small room, and because you pass through it from the garage to the house, I wanted a counter placed on top of the washer and dryer (we have a front load washer). That counter top would be very handy and multipurpose, for placing shopping bags as they are brought in from the car, items we want to take out to the cars, a staging area for feeding the dogs, etc. And indeed it has been great. However, on that trip to check on the progress of the house, I saw that the contractor had instructed his men to build a frame for a riser (~13” high) underneath the washer and dryer. Because it was only one of a number of problems we identified on that trip, I had a melt down. It was clearly written on the plans that we wanted a counter there, and now, because of that riser, that counter top would be basically unusable - it would be almost 50” high! The dryer vent passed inside the riser, as did the floor drain for the washer. Nice thoughts on how to vent the dryer, but now I wouldn’t have a counter top where I needed it. We weren’t ever asked about these deviations from the plans, they just made them. I wasn’t very nice when I told them to tear the damned frame out. The contractor wasn’t happy – where would he put the dryer vent? His problem, not mine, but we had to help solve the problem. There was no reason the vent couldn’t be routed through the abutting garage wall, enclosed, and exit the house a few feet from the original location. So, the frame was torn out, and the dryer vent re-routed. But, the electrical outlets for the washer and dryer weren’t lowered to compensate for the change, nor were the recessed drain/water unit for the washer, or the recessed gas outlet/wall vent for the dryer lowered. Seems like they should have fixed those too, but they didn’t. The counter we now have cuts right in front of one of the outlets – our solution was to use a switched surge protector and place it above the counter. Since we are a solar house, having that outlet switched works well. The drain/water connections are above the counter – that’s ok too. What wasn’t ok, was the way the dryer vent had to be connected since the vent outlet hadn’t been lowered. When we moved down several months later, we found that the dryer worked fine when it was pulled out from the wall a foot, but when pushed flush to the wall (as it needed to be) it would shut off - too many tight turns in the vent tubing. After numerous unsuccessful tries to fix it, I finally told one of the men to forget about trying to “fix” it by connecting it to the recessed unit, and to just cut through the wallboard and straight into the vent, completely bypassing the tight turns. The dryer itself, and the counter top, would hide how jury-rigged (ugly) the solution was. Now the dryer could be pushed flush to the wall and it worked great. Such a small thing, but it would have changed the usefulness of the room to not have that counter top.
More on these building adventures (fiascos) at a future date.
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