LG Washer and Dryer Review (Four Years Later)

Occasionally I like to update you all about big ticket items we've purchased over the years. I always find it helpful when bloggers talk about appliances and how they have worked for them over time -- I think honest reviews are some of my favorite posts to read. (I'm planning an update on our kitchen soon to do just that.)

Recently a friend was on the search for a new washer and dryer set and I was raving about ours. I figured it was time I shared my thoughts here on the set we purchased years ago. In short -- I LOVE them. But there are a few things to think about that I'll go over. 

Four years ago we purchased a LG washer and dryer set (here's our washer and I believe this is the dryer -- they've changed the design a bit): 

I know there's big debate over top/front loaders. (Seriously, people get a little weird about their dedication towards one or the other, right?) We went with top loaders mostly because I didn't want to deal with the mildew issues so many have with the front loaders. It sounds like it's gotten better over the years but I just didn't want to have to mess with cleaning the door. 

The other reason was that this top loader is the biggest capacity of it's kind available and it holds a CRAZY amount of clothes. It doesn't have an agitator so there's a ton of room inside. I can fit a ridiculous amount of stuff in there: 

Look how it still looks brand new too! Love it. Back in the day I'd fill our old washer with clothes and if it was too full it wouldn't get everything clean. We've never had a problem with that yet. I don't miss the agitator at all either. I've never had a problem with clothes getting torn up and they are always clean.

Two things I love about the washer -- it senses how much is in the washer so it only fills with as much water as is needed. No need to set it for a certain level. Also, the spin cycle is the BOMB. Seriously, even heavy blankets come out nearly dry because the spin works so great. 

The only thing I would caution about this washer is it may not be ideal for shorter folks. The basin really is super deep and even at 5'9" I have to really lean in there to get all the little socks and stuff. If you are a few inches shorter you may need to use a stool and it won't be as comfortable to use. 

The dryer is just as awesome. There's a ton of settings for drying: 

I love that I can set it quickly with one of the settings on the dial or make my own with time/heat/steam. 

I just used the steam option today to get wrinkles out of a few shirts. There's a door on top that holds the water for that. One very smart reader told me years ago that she uses that spot for dryer sheets and I do the same now. I just open the little door to grab one -- it's the little things that make life easier. ;)

Again, the capacity is HUGE and I can put a ginormous load in there and it will actually dry. Imagine that. I remember running our old dryer for an hour finding half of it still wet. I really think the spin cycle on the washer helps this tremendously. 

One of my favorite parts of the dryer is that it somehow senses how wet the clothes are. I guess that can be a drawback too, because if you turn it on a setting on the knob and the time shows 35 minutes, it may take longer than that depending on the load. I've set a timer and gone back down to find it reset for more time because the clothes weren't dry. It's not a negative thing for us -- I like that it takes care of that on it's own!

I love the gray color we went with as well. They are so sleek and pretty. OH, and they "sing" a little ditty when the load is done -- I think it's adorable and like it but you can turn that option off if you want. :) 

Our laundry room is one of those that is still in process, but it works well for us so the finishing touches haven't been high on my list.The cabinets have been up for years and need to be painted. I've added more cabinet storage on the other side of this room so it will be a big job to get them all done at once. Someday it will happen. :)  

 

I'll add links to a few of the projects in this space below, but if you have any other questions about the laundry room or the washer and dryer, please ask away! 

Do you have this set? It's been nearly four years and so far so good with these. We haven't had any problems at all (knock on wood). Do you prefer the top loading washers or are you a front loader fan? I think we'll be top loaders for life. :)


Here are a few projects from the room you may find helpful: 
DIY shelf behind washer and dryer:

DIY floating shelves tutorial:

How to switch the direction your dryer door opens:

Read More

The Laundry Room: Making it work

Hello everybody! Hope your week is going well! I can hardly believe it’s Thursday already. Crazy pants.

I’ve been working on purging the basement (you can see one of my big projects earlier this week here) and it was when I moved on to the laundry room that I realized I haven’t shared progress in here since last year.

It’s been a year since I’ve blogged about this space when I built the shelf behind the washer and dryer:

When we got the new set I knew I wanted a top loading washer, so the little shelf along the back gives us a spot for some items we need within reach and it hides all the ugly stuff behind the set. :) 

But we’ve made some updates to make this a more functional space over the past year and although the room is still very much in between, I wanted to share some of them!

The room is smaller than we originally planned -- we had to work with beams in the basement so this room get a little tighter. It’s just over eight by five feet, which is still a dream compared to the mud/laundry room space we had upstairs before. A DREAM.

But with the washer and dryer taking up most of that space and a door to the storage room, I’ve had to be smart about storage and any additions in here.

We’ve always used one of those wooden drying racks that you open up on the floor, but this hanging rack from IKEA works just as well (and takes up way less space!):

I wanted small laundry baskets that would stay in here all the time and last year I found ADORABLE polka dotted ones at the container store:

One for lights, one for darks. It’s so great to just grab one and just dump it in the laundry. And they’re tall and skinny so they fit perfectly right next to the dryer.

I’ve added some storage in here so the shelf behind the washer and dryer only holds the necessities now. My glass jar for the detergent and a little box hides the dryer sheets:

 

I like the necessities to be cute, alright? :)

We moved the ironing board down here and it hangs next to the door:

We set it up right outside in the family room and watch TV while ironing. It makes it suck a little less. ;)

You can see a lot of the to do’s in the photo above – I installed that cabinet to use some of the awkward space in here and it needs to be finished up. I have ideas for the wall above it too. The storage room door needs to be painted (it will be black like the rest of the doors) and the trim all needs to be painted too.

One thing I did to help make this room a little bigger when we finished the space was to push it out to the family room area just a bit more than planned (to the right):

That allowed me to put double doors on the room instead of a standard door. I LOVE it – I can easily carry baskets or armfuls of laundry through the door without banging into them. (And yes, they still need hardware. On the list.)

I still love love love the hexagon tile we put in here – it was so inexpensive and looks great. It is chilly on bare feet though so I have small mats in front of the washer and dryer:

I’m always looking for one rug that would be the right size/color but it’s hard to find. These get dirty really easily so I don’t think they’ll stay forever.

And obviously we installed two small cabinets on the wall (that need to be painted) – I didn’t want it to be all cabinets and I didn’t want just shelving (I wanted some of the stuff to be out of sight), so we went with two. Initially I was planning on hanging a rod between them to hang clothes but quickly realized I didn’t want to look at that all the time. (And we really don’t keep clothes down here.)

So now I’m planning a mix of both hidden and open storage – shelves between the two cabinets. I’m also planning on bringing in more color to this space and doing some kind of treatment to that wall. Haven’t decided just what yet.

There’s still so much I want to do but it’s already wonderfully functional and it’s come a long way from how it looked just over a year ago:

Compared to how it looks now:

And yes…a year later I still LOVE having a laundry room in the basement. It was the right move for us but it may not be for everyone.

Do you have a big laundry room? Is it combined with your mud room or does it stand alone? This one is way bigger than the space we had in our old mud/laundry combo but I’m still always trying to use every bit of it as best as I can.

Read More

Would I do it again? (Laundry chute)

So every so often I like to update you on projects that I’ve done/purchases I’ve made to let you know how they’ve held up and if I like them as much as I thought I would. I’m always curious to hear that so I like to share in case you are wondering too.

I will say…I think and research and plan things to DEATH, so it’s rare that I regret doing anything. This one I’m still not sure about. :)

I shared our completed powder room a couple months ago and I’m so happy with how it turned out:

We have a huge powder room, right? It’s big as far as powder rooms go. We could have made it a full bathroom (it’s near my office which could have been another bedroom), but we went with the half. Anyway, I’m so glad we have a linen closet in this room.

What you didn’t see at that reveal, and many of you have already seen, was the big honkin’ tube inside the closet:

That is something I dreamed about for years and was SO thrilled to get installed. By now you’ve probably read the title of this post and deduced that this is our laundry chute. Smarty. ;) (You can see more about it here.)

What you didn’t see was the horrible, no good, did I mention horrible paint job I started last year. Originally I was going for red walls in this room and thought it may be fun to add a touch of red to the shelves (they needed to be painted anyway):

Ugh. I know. I mean, the photo is horrible but seriously…I KNOW. It was horrible. This one goes in the what was I thinking column.

I was going for white walls and bright red shelves, but somewhere along the way I got lazy and didn’t tape off (WHY?) so the paint got on the walls. And the PVC was always ugly -- initially I tried to get the lettering off the pipe using a method a reader mentioned, but it didn’t work for me. Then I thought, I’ll just paint it! Red! Like the rest of the closet! Brilliant!

Well red doesn’t cover well. Your tip of the day. So I stopped.

Anyway, I fixed it – more on that in a minute.

First up, the main purpose of this post. Would I do the laundry chute again? I’ve thought a lot about this lately and actually, I probably wouldn’t.

There’s a few reasons for this. The biggest – I never do laundry. I just…don’t. My husband does his own and I wait until I am out of clothes to wash my own. I will dig to the bottom of a drawer to find an odd sock before I will do laundry. It’s just my thing. I don’t hate laundry like I used to now that we have an actual laundry room, but I just don’t do it.

It’s my thing.

BUT. Because I don’t do it often, I wait till I can’t wait anymore and then I spend a day washing clothes, so in those instances it is nice to be able to just drop the clothes down the chute. Thing is, you still have to take the basket down to carry them back up when they’re done. So if I’m doing one load here or there I just take the clothes down in the basket because I’m going to have to bring them up in it anyway.

All that being said…our closet is a major disaster right now so I’m on a laundry binge. It’s laundry all the time – and I’ve been using the chute a ton.

Perhaps if we had more kids and more clothes I would use it more? Maybe someday when I’m totally and completely organized (snort) and I keep up with washing the clothes I will find it more helpful.

But for now…I walk the clothes down the stairs as much as I throw them down. I gotta say though – it’s fun. There is pure joy that happens when you throw the clothes down and hear them thump into the laundry basket. It kind of rocks. ;)

So…the chute is staying. Which brings me back to the hideous red linen closet. I finally painted it. The powder room was next on my decluttering rampage and like usual I couldn’t pass up this little DIY that needed to happen.

I used some paint I already had – it was a color called Billowing Clouds that I originally used to paint the powder room years ago. I didn’t want to spend a ton of time on this so I painted the walls and the shelves both the blue color:

Oh, I did prime first that red first, just one coat. Since I was painting the walls it took no time at all. I was able to prime, paint and organize the stuff in here in a couple hours. I’ve put this off for a year, and it took less than two hours. Story of my life!

You may notice the polka dots. ;) Yes, I covered the tube. YES…I obviously have no life. It was just so ugly. I went through a few options in my head for covering it and then remembered I had some contact paper. AND it matched the new paint. It’s like it was meant to be!:

See, I kind of have a life – I didn’t do the bottom part. Honestly it took about 15 minutes to cover it – and the dots make me smile when I open this door. :) I want to get some sticky tiles to put on the floor in there (I didn’t have the hardwoods put in the closet since the cuts would have been so tricky and added to the cost.)

By the way, a few readers wondered if that little bend in the pipe would keep things from going down and it doesn’t at all. Nothing has gotten stuck – even bulky towels and sheets because it’s so slick inside. So as far as laundry chutes go, this is a good one!

After decluttering the stuff in the bins in here I was able to get rid of one (that is a great feeling!). So even though we have half the space in here that we used to, everything still fits great:

And it’s pretty cute, seriously. I say even though other people won’t see a space, if you have to look at it every day it’s your prerogative to make it cute. :)

SO. Overall I do like having the laundry chute, but if I could do it again I would have waited longer before installing it. I think I would have decided that we really didn’t need it after all.

Have you ever done something in your house you are iffy about? Regret any renovations or decisions you made? I don’t know if I regret this one really, I just would have waited to see how things functioned without it.

Read More