The Weirdest Room In Our House

How's that for a title?

Since we moved into our little row house here in Philly in August, I've shown y'all each of the main areas of it at least once, but one part I've never talked about is the basement. A third of our thousand-ish square footage is down there including our "guest bedroom" (more on that another time) and the weirdest room in our humble abode: the second bathroom/laundry room. When we were house hunting up here, I never thought we'd get a second bathroom due to our budget, so I was thrilled to see that in the listing for this house. But it's a weird, weird space...and clearly was added to the house without a whole lot of thought.

Why is it so weird, you might ask? Well, let's start with this feature:

That's the door to the bathroom/laundry room. (Please forgive the terrible lighting in these photos. It is a basement after all.) Do you see any problems with that? Oh yes, it's a glass-paned door! *Ahem* What happened to the idea of privacy for this bathroom? It used to be all glass - I actually covered those nine panels in the middle with white contact paper so our guests would at least have a little bit of privacy down there ;).

Open the door and straight in front of you is our washer/dryer combo with a lovely "privacy curtain" behind it that the landlord rigged up using a shower curtain. There's a tiny window up there behind it, right on the street, so he cared about privacy from that standpoint? Ha! I guess it's a good thing to have, but it's not the prettiest thing in the world.

On the right side of the room is the toilet, which you can see peeking out in the photo below...

Not only is there a toilet in here (with a padded foam seat I might add), but...wait for it...a bidet!

Because everyone wants that in their bathroom, right?

Funny story about this bidet. This bathroom is a recent addition to the house, and when we came to look at the house originally, the realtor told us that the landlord added it because he's Albanian and Albanians always wash their feet when they come in the house. Supposedly they use a retrofitted bidet for this purpose? My follow up question to the realtor was do they really trek downstairs to the basement to do that? (Plus, the landlord never actually lived in this house.) Did he really think that his renters would be excited about the bidet? So many questions...

To me, it's just kind of in the way unfortunately.

Anyway, onto the other side of this room!

If you make a u-turn from the bidet, there's a shower on one side...

...and a little sink area tucked into the corner. You have to shimmy past the washer/dryer to get there, but it works!

Also, please note the random wooden door. That's the access to the breaker box and other utility-related things for the house. I think that wooden door was once a cabinet door in another life...

So that, my friends, is the weirdest room in our house. What do you think? I'm pretty sure they picked up everything except for the tile and washer/dryer from a salvage yard. What it does have going for it, I will say, is that it's neutral. The tile is actually pretty nice and I'm thrilled to have a bathroom for our guests so they don't have to climb two flights of stairs to share our tiny bathroom with us.

I'm dying to do a couple of things to make it a little prettier and more functional, but obviously the setup is pretty limiting and we rent, so no major changes. I might just build a temporary box to cover the bidet and add shelving on top if it or something, haha. Do any of you have any brilliant ideas for this space?

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