House Project: Laundry Room Remodel

While a laundry room remodel may not sound like much fun, it was one of those things on my must-do list that randomly became this weekend's project. My laundry room is the first room we enter when we come home - it's just off the garage. It's been an eye sore for me from day one, but I had bigger fish to fry so I've been ignoring it. This was the laundry room before this weekend:

Yes, I needed to iron. It's been completed as well, ok? Anyway, so this are all the things that drove me crazy about the space. First, I didn't like being able to see all the bottles of cleaner and what not. It just made the room look so cluttered to have all that sitting out for the world to see. When the house was built, obviously there was one shelf in the laundry room that sat in the middle of the wall from side to side. The previous owners had a stacked washer/dryer, so they had to remove that shelf and put their own shelves up but couldn't be bothered to remove the ugly 1x4s that were on the wall. So that useless wood was just ugly. I also hated all the shelf brackets. They were just too industrial looking and the wall looks messy because of them. Lastly, my clothes rod (a necessity for all the stuff we don't put in the dryer) is actually a shower curtain rod that was just barely long enough (note the sagging in the middle) but it got the job done. It was all I had when we moved in and I just went with it.

My original plan was to purchase an unfinished cabinet from Lowe's and paint it, then hang it above the washing machine and reconfigure the rod. I needed to wait until we had the extra money laying around for that because those cabinets are about $90. Then my next door neighbor unknowingly came to my rescue last week by sticking a chest of drawers with no drawers out on the curb. I ran out and grabbed it, trying to figure out what I would do with it when it dawned on me - add shelves and use it in the laundry room. I removed all of the drawer tracks and was ready to go. I already had a little black curtain rod that I could hang at the top so I would not need doors. It cost me $15.53 in lumber to add a bottom and middle shelf. I also cut the four legs off at the bottom.

Bill came over on Saturday morning and we got to work. I had taken as much of the shelving down as I could, but he had to rip the 1x4s off the wall and remove the top shelf since I was too short to reach all the screws. When he pulled off the top shelf, it revealed a seriously bright blue wall color that obviously filled this tiny space at some point. I can't even imagine why.

Once we got the new shelf unit in place, we used the same shower curtain rod but just hung it over the dryer instead of all the way across. We added the top shelf back so I would have some storage space all the way across, and voila! Then it was time to start puttying and painting.

 It's already so much better, and I haven't even added the stuff back!

 I had some material that I had purchased sometime last year just sitting on a shelf in the spare room, so I sent it over to Nana to make me some curtains for my shelf. Now everything is still accessible but hidden and the room looks so much nicer!

The only thing I still want to do is get some kind of cute laundry wall decal to stick on the wall above the dryer and it will be complete! Even though the new shelving sticks out 5" further than the old shelves did, the room feels much bigger now than before the transformation. I'm pretty happy about it all...and it only cost me $15.53!