Airing our dirty Laundry: Chapter 5 THE BIG REVEAL

These are my two favorite words in all of renovation-dom: IT’S DONE!!!  As in finito, over and out, roger, over!  That’s Clarence Over!  BASTA!  DONE!  FIN!  THE END!  THAT’S ALL SHE WROTE….you get the picture.  I should just remind you that our upstairs laundry room and adjacent hallway (which I walk through *every*single*morning*afternoon*and*night*) has been a construction war zone and tool graveyard for about two months now.  We started this process on Mother’s Day and are finally wrapping up the finishing touches just in time for the beautiful summer weather!  So when I say that many times this project tried my patience, I’m not lying!  It was easily the biggest project we’ve tackled to date with by far some of the most dramatic afters and we are *soooo* happy with it!  But seriously….what are we waiting for?  Let’s get to the before and afters!

Laundry Room Before Move In

Obviously needing some love, no??  Talk about a complete blank slate in this room!  We took the opportunity (before we even moved in the house) to punch it up a little and do a tone-on-tone painting technique that completely changed the character of the room.  We get by far the *most* compliments on this room’s painting scheme than any other room and we totally loved the results (well, this and the Guest Room, of course!):

Laundry Room Midpoint

…but after about 9 months of living with this storage-less box of a room with a piddly little hand-me-down bookcase as our only means of stash space, we *really* needed to reclaim some real estate and make it more usable.  We detailed all of our problems with this room a few months back, which you can read all about by clicking here.  Since that time, we have been spending most of our weekends and work nights installing cabinetry, re-wiring our laundry room for both electric and plumbing, installing sinks, faucets, and just generally giving this laundry room a 21st century overhaul and total makeover/renovation!  And did I mention we had to squeeze all of that functionality and style into a tight 9′ x 6′ room?  Enough jibber jabber, though – how about ‘dem apples?:

Laundry Room After!

Cabinets and counters and lights – OH MY!

We kicked off the Laundry Room renovation by exhaustively searching for cabinetry for our room only to find ourselves at the great Swedish escape of Ikea!  For the price, the selection, the warranty, and the ease of installation, you really can’t do much better!  And two months later, I have to say that we are soooooo pleased with our purchase.  They’ve already gotten a ton of use and are just as crisp, clean and gorgeous as the day they came out of the box!!

We were even able to get a “drawer unit” to store things like light bulbs, miscellaneous items and even some larger items like detergents and cleaners!  We have *so* much more space, in fact, that we were finally able to bring our extra paint cans inside and store them in a temperature controlled environment so that they don’t get “thick” from being stored in the cold garage over the winter.

…but since we had all this wonderful cabinetry, we wanted to be able to show it off a little  bit!  So Dr. J (the real brains of this bunch) completely wired the back wall for electricity (twice!  Which you can read all about here) so that we could install puck lights underneath the cabinets.  I can’t tell you how much easier it is to sort laundry now and we’re finding that our socks match *much* better now than they used to.  We no longer pair one navy with one black sock that you only notice when you are five minutes from leaving work….le sigh.

….and then we have our lovely new sink and faucet, bought for a screamin’ deal from Ikea and Overstock.com, which you can read about here.  Dr. J *also* had to rearrange some plumbing in this room to be sure that we could install a sink in here (there was a drain already installed, but it was in the wrong place.  You can read more about that by clicking here).  We decided to go with a smaller sized sink simply because the room is pretty tight and for the amount of hand washing we do (i.e. almost none), this was pretty much all we needed!  We’ve already used it several times and YOWZA!  We *love* it!  It’s also much nicer to clean out paint brushes in this sink as opposed to our nicer porcelain sinks in the upstairs bathrooms (our only option when we are upstairs painting).  And our cute little bar faucet fits so perfectly with the sink.  We absolutely *love* them both!

And then how could we forget the floors?!?!?!  Hands down the biggest change to this space and the entire upstairs hallway!  We had super cheap (both feeling and looking) vinyl flooring in the laundry room that did nothing to make this room feel warm and we also had about 200 square feet of white-ish, dingy, and stinky/smoky carpet out in the hallway that made the whole space feel dated and (worse yet) just plain dirty.  We ripped all of the carpet out and replaced it with cork so that we could have a seamless and cohesive look all throughout the upstairs hallway and laundry.   It instantly made the whole space feel more spacious, glam, and instantly historic!  Now everytime we walk upstairs, we can’t help but smile at how pretty these floors are!

So now I can safely say that I have the Laundry Room of my dreams and I couldn’t be more pleased with it!  Well, I’d love to get some better appliances, but that will come in time (we spent $80 buying those beauties on Craigslist – HA HA!).  We saved a boatload of money by doing *all* of the work ourselves, including my wonderful Father-in-law who helped out one weekend when I just needed a break and treated myself to some new shoes instead – thanks, Dad!!!!!  We love you!!  My husband did the majority of the work in this space with me just serving as backup catcher when needed and I can’t thank him enough for all of his hard work!  This space looks like it’s in a completely different house!!!!  All I can say is, I’m a lucky gal and he’s got mad skillz!  I am so proud of him and I have to say that we make a pretty good team :-).

But You Tell’Us!! How did we do?!!?  Have you tackled any major laundry room renovations?  They seem to be the choice place to renovate lately!  Share and share alike!

Want to check out all of the previous installments in our Laundry Room Makeover?  Click on Chapter 1 to read about how we formualted a plan to upgrade this room, Chapter 2 where we finally added some very functional cabinetry to the mix, Chapter 3 where we added electricity and plumbing, our teaser post, and Chapter 4 for the floors!