Wednesday, October 15, 2014

Laundry Room Makeover: Done In One Day and Using What We Have

My laundry room is the least favorite room in the house. It's small, dark and right off the living room. It's also the pass through to the garage so it ends up being a drop zone, it's too small for a drop zone. Then there was the paint... it was blue, like a bright blue with royal blue trim. 


The room needed help bad. 


It had that "this is a random room in an old factory" look. Complete with fire extinguisher... 


The wood cabinets are boring and the one on the side wall bugs me.. it's like just in an awkward spot. We are not redoing them right now, they will have to do and we need the storage bad. There is no floor space for a different type of storage. 

The worst part is how exposed this room is to the living room. There is a door.. but with my boys running their dirty clothes in there and accessing the dog food, the door is always open. So when you sit on the sofa, this is the view. 

Not so inspiring, is it?

We have plans to do some renovating the garage area in a while and it will have a new mud room/laundry, so while the room needed a makeover, it needed to be done in a thrifty way. Why spend money when this room would be overhauled in the future? So my plan is to makeover using only things I ALREADY HAVE. I know, crazy right?  I have some partial cans of paint in the garage from repainting the main rooms and a can of old trim paint. I also have tons of decor around that could be put to use.

What to do with the cabinets? Paint.. if they didn't have flat fronts I might have considered it. They would look pretty boring with large expanses of white and no texture. I opted to take the doors off the big ones over the machines. Should I go with open shelves and pretty baskets? Sorry, I'm just too unorganized for that look. I went through my stack of Goodwill shower curtains and picked out a the Target bird one. I cut the shower curtain in half width wise. After hemming the raw edges and creating a pocket for the rod, I grabbed a couple of extension rods the old home owners left behind and hung one curtain at the top of the cabinet, Leaving the bottom area exposed for easy access to laundry soap and a place to display decor. The other half went below the cabinet to hid the hoses and electric cords. I didn't put it against the wall, it's actually about 5 inches forward. This gives breathing room behind for the equipment. 

After paint and a bit of reorganizing... this is how it turned out. 


I decided to keep the vintage towel rods.. they make great indoor clothes lines. I added a few clothes pins. It also fits my vintage washboard. 


The open space in the cabinet gives a shelf feel and makes a good area for decor, and easy access to my soap. (I need more dry detergent, but I currently have a kiddo home with a cold. So no store outings for the next couple days.)

I added a simple folded cotton rug I already had to the top of the dryer. It makes a soft space to put a laundry basking and keeps it from making noises while the machine is running. 


Remember that wall with the fire extinguisher? It now has a nice gilt mirror that is perfect for quick glance at ones hair and makeup before heading out to the garage and car. The flat boring door to the garage is dressed up with a chalk painted metal wall hanging. The white paint is a huge improvement.



Now this is the view from the living room. It's not perfect, it's not super glamorous.. but it's a huge improvement and best of all, I spent no money on it. Everything was stuff from around the house, things we already had. 

So here they are side by side. 


So much better. 









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