Laundry Room Makeover

After more than a year, I’m finally posting the before and after pictures of our laundry room remodel. Really, they are before, during, after, and after/full of stuff pictures. The first pictures I took last summer (2010). I sent them to Nate to say “we really need to do something about our laundry room.” It was such a disaster! My quality husband told me to make a plan and we would do it. We didn’t really get started until October (2010) since there were too many other things going on. Once we started, we kicked it out in a couple of weekends. Over a year later, I am still in love with the changes we made. It is still a tiny room, but it is tons more functional. And, I can actually see the floor.




Here are some of my favorite things about our “new” room:

The laundry basket shelves. I wanted to have two big shelves for laundry baskets so we would never have piles of laundry on the floor again. Nate came through for me and put in perfect shelves. He actually put them in twice. He had them up (with the screw holes puttied over and sanded) when I decided that they needed to be about an inch and a half higher. It is a good thing he loves me! It didn’t end up being quite as much work as we thought it would be to move them. He left them in one piece and just detached them from the wall. Then he raised them up using a couple of car jacks and some 2x4s. I’m sure he figured it would be less painful to redo the shelves than to listen to me complain about them for the next 30 years. They turned out great. They are a full eight inches deeper than the original shelves (except where Nate curved them back over the sink) and easily hold all seven of our laundry baskets.

The other shelves. We decided to take better advantage of the vaulted ceilings (that our builder put in by mistake) and build a few extra shelves around the room. It is nice to have that extra storage space.

The paint. I wanted something bright and bold. I love the color we picked (in real life, if not in all of the pictures). New appliances weren’t in our budget and our old washer and dryer still work, so we gave them a fresh coat of paint too. Ten bucks for some white appliance spray paint sure beats $1000 for a new washer and dryer.

The sink. When we were building our house, we told our builder that we wanted as big of a sink as would fit in the room. Instead, we ended up with a tiny, fairly useless sink. We looked around and found a much larger sink that would fit in the same cabinet (with some minor modifications). It is so nice to have a big, deep sink to rinse things out.

The closet rod. We moved the closet rod so it spans across the room between the shelves. I love being able to hang up clothes as soon as I take them out of the dryer. Plus, moving it freed up space for the kids to hang up their coats.

The bench. This was the part that made the project stretch out to almost a year. Nate finished building the bench a few months ago, but I took forever deciding how to finish it. I finally found a stain that I liked. Since Nate had done all of the other work, I decided to be brave and finish it myself. It took four coats to get the color I was going for, but I love how it turned out. It is so nice to have a place for the kids to put their backpacks and lunch bags. Plus, now the kids can reach the hooks to hang up their own jackets so I don’t have to.