Airing our dirty laundry, Chapter 1

Since we first moved into our house, Dr. J and I have completely fallen head-over-heels in love with our second floor laundry room!  Since it’s on the second floor, it has cut down on that pesky step of having to drag clothing all the way to a basement or even to the first floor!  Not only that, but then we don’t have to drag it back *up* the stairs when it’s all clean!  Yup, definitely swooning up here!

Buuuuuuuut………

…while we love the location, the room itself leaves a *lot* to be desired.  In case you haven’t noticed, there is absolutely no cabinetry, no storage, no sink, and only one dim “boob light” to help us sort our navys from our blacks.  Almost immediately after we moved in, Dr. J and I started formulating plans for our laundry room overhaul and 9 months later, it is waaaay overdue!  But as interesting as it is to talk about all of this stuff, I thought I would try my hand at creating a small little “Mood Board” for our Laundry Room to give you a visual idea of just where we would like for this to go.  Ok, here goes nothing….

This was my first attempt at creating a Mood Board, so I apologize if it’s a little ho-hum.  I created it using Gimp because I’m too poor for Photoshop!

Color Scheme:  The striped walls are going to stay, but we definitely want to bring in some extra punches of color either in the form of an apple/spring green color or a lighter sea sky blue color.  Since I know precisely what I want and I can’t seem to “find” it anywhere, I’ve determined I am going to have to make it myself.  It’ll be yet another Champagne (Art) on a Beer Budget – that’s the way we roll, people!  Stay tuned, but I promise it’ll be cute, cheap, and easy (but not in the freshman-year-of-college type of way – in the Tell’er All About It way).

Cabinets (#1): We searched high and low for these beauts!  It’s definitely a story for another time but we ended up using Ikea’s in-house kitchen planning program and came up with a pretty fullproof plan for a rock bottom price!  Not only were these cabinets better quality than the pre-built ones from Lowe’s/Home Depot (which were laminated as opposed to painted), but they were also a “luxury height” at 39″, which means more storage and a classier high-end look!  We have about 9′ of total upper real estate width and about 4′ of lower width real estate, so we’ll hang both uppers and lowers to maximize all of our storage area and really give this room a ton of functionality!  Can we say, “Sold to the man in the funny hat!”

Counters (#2): We decided to go with these beautiful Lagan Countertops from our favorite Swedish escape because not only are they easy on the eyes, they are easy on the wallet!  You can’t get much cheaper than a Butcher Block counter and if it’s good enough for a butcher, then it’s good enough for our laundry room!  Not only that, but it’s also much more eco-friendly than a laminate counter and since these counters aren’t going to get a ton of use (unless we get the urge to chop our vegetables upstairs for some reason), we feel pretty good about the occasional upkeep of rubbing them down with some Lintseed oil just to keep things running like clockwork.

Faucet (#3): We searched high and low (including Ikea, Lowe’s, and Home Depot) until I found this sparkler at Overstock.com!  Without a doubt it was one of the best prices we found for the functionality.  Since it’s a laundry room and we’ll no doubt be using it to do mostly hand-washables and the occasional paint brush rinse-out, something simple was all we needed, but having a pull-out wand was definitely a must for bucket fill ups and emergency stain removal!  It also has classic styling, which falls in line with our beadboard-inspired cabinets and butcher block counters.  Lastly, it’s also stainless steel, so less maintenance for us and it matches the sink we picked out below.

Sink (#4): You can’t have a faucet without a sink (I hear it could get kind of messy), so while we realized that a sink is sort of an “option” in a laundry room (most places we have lived have never had one), we really wanted to have a go-to place for laundry, of course, but also the occasional paint brush rinse out and bucket fill-up.  We also didn’t want to spend an arm and a leg and while a large laundry basin seems like the natural way to go, we know that we just don’t have that many hand washable items, so we felt it was best to design the sink around our lifestyle and not the other way around.  We decided to settle on this simple model because it had a fun shape (hello, round?) and was just the right size for the occasional brush clean up and maybe for some unmentionables cleaning here and there – I’m a small girl, so my bras don’t take up a lot of room – le sigh.  It will also save us precious counter space which we may use to house our Heineken Keg-er-ator that’s been collecting dust in the garage for lack of a better place to put it (yup, we’re classy people right here!).

Flooring (#5): We have long wanted to replace the flooring in the laundry room and since we are doing both upper and lower cabinetry, we figured now was as good a time as any to go ahead and tackle not only the laundry room, but the entire adjacent upstairs hallway!  We are on a mission to replace all of the carpet in our house and so we needed something that was a) hard wearing, b) pretty, and c) NOT carpet (we are over carpet like a bad 80s hairstyle!).  We looked high and low before finally deciding on this beautiful cork flooring!  Cork is one of the oldest flooring materials around and also one of the most durable!  Did you know the original cork floors are still in place at both Frank Lloyd Wright’s Falling Water and The Library of Congress?  How’s that for hard-wearing?!  It’s also a great eco-friendly alternative since Cork doesn’t “off-gas” like carpet or vinyl and since it’s only made from the bark of the tree, it’s a very sustainable product (i.e. – no trees were cut down in the making of this product).  It has the look and warmth of wood, but without the worry of scratches and polishing.  It’s soft underfoot (and sound dampening to boot), so any night walkers (i.e. dogs and night-owl husbands) won’t wake the neighbors or the sleeps-like-a-baby wife.  Sign us up….or down….since we’ll be spending a lot of time on our knees to install these…ouch!

So there ya have it!  We are going to do our best to be as budget conscious as possible when doing this makeover and we’re going to document every painful step in the process…..yikes!  So stay tuned for the big reveal in a few months and the smaller (but no-less impressive) reveals throughout the the coming weeks!  Oh, and wish us luck while you’re here!  We’re gonna need it!