home hack: laundry room

I've confessed before how this house is obscenely big for just the 4 of us.

The previous owners had fitted out the top floor to be a separate-entrance flat for their son (and various tenants over the years), creating a 'kitchenette' from what used to be a second bathroom. A room with a gorgeous view (confession: most of the rooms here have them) and no real purpose for us.
For the last 10 months it's been a bit of a dump space, filled with boxes and 25l tins of paint and some overflow kitchen stuff which didn't fit in the cupboards downstairs.

Then winter came and I discovered that our outside washing line gets ZERO sun in the winter months. Time for a hack ...

Up went a retracting washing line in the spare, north-facing room upstairs (which also happens to be my dressing room - I'm just going to stop apologising for this shit ok?) - happy sunny washing with a view!

And a gorgeous place to hang out and, um ... hang out. AND how convenient to remove washing from line, fold, turn, and put away in cupboard? So convenient.

But ... I wasn't done. Now we were generating all our dirty laundry upstairs, hanging our wet laundry upstairs, storing our clean laundry upstairs ... what's missing?

Yup, we hauled the washing machine ... upstairs. And over a weekend recently I cleared out the 'kitchenette' and made a bona fide laundry room. Such as one may see on Pinterest but minus the twee posters and plus some pretty dodgy 'gold' tiles.
Which the washer and dryer share with the cats (a quiet, elevated place for their kibbles) and just a little bit of main kitchen overflow.
And did I mention the view?

Ah, it all makes a little home-makers heart very happy.

But the best thing?
'Muuuuuuuum, where are you?'
'I'm upstaaaaaairs doing the laundry. Be down in a minute.'

Did I mention my bed and my book are also upstairs?

Diabolical.