Well, it’s 2019 now and that means we missed the ending of the one room challenge by two months since we were supposed to be done at the end of October/beginning of November. I know that’s technically a fail, but, honestly, October was a rough month for home projects because we were busy with projects for Emma’s first birthday, Halloween (did you see our costumes this year? Amazingly cute, right?), and tearing down our shed and getting the house painted. All of which did get done…so, I can’t complain too much I don’t think.

Plus, we’re beginning the year with a beautiful new laundry room, so there totally could be worse things in life, right?

I mean, isn’t this lovely? I just want to stand in here and soak it in every day. It’s better than I even hoped it would be!

From the beginning, I knew I wanted a shelf above the washer and dryer, and cabinets all the way to the ceiling and all the way across the wall above them. As a reminder, this is what we had before, only a small cabinet on one side and it was NOT very functional for us at all! I was using hangers to hold lunch bags and coolers on the drying rack thing because we literally never used that for clothes. Not once ever, I don’t think, in the six years we’ve lived here.

Now that I’ve seen how good it can look, I feel a little sad we waited so long to tackle this, but I know it wouldn’t have looked this good if we had done it a few years ago. Our style is changing and our abilities are improving, so every room we do becomes my new favorite. I think that’s how it’s supposed to be, right?

Anyway, let’s dive into the laundry room a bit more, shall we? I want to say that I’m bummed this room is so hard to photograph because it honestly does look so much better in person. But, I am not wanting to drop several hundred dollars on a wide angle lens at the moment…so we’ll just do our best to share the loveliness with what we have to work with.

For starters, we scraped the popcorn ceiling and painted it a fresh, bright white. You can read all about our process of removing popcorn ceilings here. (It’s actually really easy!) Then, the walls got a nice clean bright white as well. There is zero natural light in this room so we wanted it to be as light as possible.

In case you’re wondering how many coats of white paint it takes to cover a bright teal paint, it’s two coats of primer and two coats of paint+primer. Thank goodness it’s a small room because I might have gone crazy with just that part of the process. I actually don’t mind painting, the first two coats. After that I am OVER IT.

Especially when it’s white paint over white paint over white primer over white primer. Ugh. The finished result is so nice and fresh and bright, but it’s not a particularly fun process to get there.

Another important decision was the ceiling light. It had been a cheap fluorescent we put up right after we moved in because it originally only had a single 60 watt bulb, which was NOT enough for a room where I’m supposed to see stains and try to clean them. This time we went for an LED with a subtle geometric vibe. You can check it out here. (We got the large size, but there is also a smaller one.) It kind of blends into the ceiling but also adds a bit of fun if you really look at it.

And let me tell you, it is BRIGHT. Still not as good as a window, but the next best thing.

Honestly though, my favorite thing is the wooden shelf and backsplash. I had been inspired by this wooden backsplash by Chris Loves Julia in their laundry room. I obviously follow them for design inspiration but I had pinned this laundry room to my board before I even knew it was theirs! So that was a fun surprise when I clicked over to the site.

Because we don’t have a front load washer (we actually really like this top loader and since we use cloth diapers, it gets a workout each week), I knew a shelf above the washer would help make them look built in. At first, we were just going to do the shelf and the backsplash above it, but then at the last minute, we decided it wouldn’t be much harder and would look MUCH better to also add the backsplash BELOW the shelf to close everything off. I’m SOO glad we did!

Not only does it look amazing, but NO socks or diapers or lint balls or dollar bills or random toys will fall back there ever again! Victory!

The little custom cabinet between the washer and dryer was also crucial! I found this option on Amazon but it wasn’t the perfect size and wouldn’t give us the built in look I really wanted. So, I asked Wyatt if he could DIwYatt for me. And of course, he could. He used wheels to make it a little rolling cart instead of drawers so we can pull it out and get easier access behind there if needed. (The washer and dryer can both be pulled out too.)

He’ll be sharing plans so you all can make your own next week, so stay tuned for that, friends. It is life changing!*

For the wall cabinets above the washer and dryer, we used two 42-inch wall cabinets from Ikea and they worked almost perfectly with only a very small spacer strip needed on the top and sides to trim them in to fit perfectly. Wyatt handled all that trim work. It’s kind of a pain (not hard, but time consuming to get an exact fit with walls that aren’t straight) but it’s so worth it in the end.

We used Ikea cabinets in our basement family room and loved the ease of them so it was a no brainer to choose them this time, too. We got the exact same style, the Sektion cabinets with the Veddinge doors, which are the flat fronts. They install really quickly using a rail system on the wall and look great.

I am SO EXCITED about the amount of storage that we will have in here now. Look how big these cabinets are! Imagine me singing the song from Little Mermaid about how many gadgets and gizmos I have (room to store) while spinning around and smiling like a fool. Or don’t picture that, because that would make me seem pretty crazy.

Yes, I’m decluttering everything, but we still have a lot of stuff. I am proud that the cabinet on the left is mostly empty. Sort of. The middle shelf is literally full of a bag of rags and old towels we will eventually move to the garage once we get all the shed stuff out of there and a space for them. But that’s another story for another day.

All in all, there is plenty of room to grow into these cabinets and I may continue to purge some other cleaning products and stuff as I finish organizing these. The goal of this room is to be able to breathe. Because there isn’t any natural light, clutter can quickly make it feel overwhelming.

I also have some storage on the shelf with a glass canister of clothes pins and these little baskets I grabbed at Ikea.

They store our little fabric shaver thing for removing lint and bumps from clothes and some extra samples of laundry packets and stuff I’ve gotten in the mail and use sometimes.

And, if you’re wondering where the ironing board and drying rack that were between the washer and dryer went, they are now hanging nicely behind the door. We rarely use them so this is perfect.

Click here to see the awful mess that was back there before.

Oh! And I can’t forget one of the best parts! The hexagon wall on the other side of the room!

Wall Quotes is an awesome family-owned vinyl wall decal company and they reached out to me to see if I wanted to be a brand rep as part of the one room challenge and I came up with this super bright and bold hexagon design and they helped me bring that to life and sent me the vinyl. It was my first time using wall vinyl and I may be totally hooked now. Also, I don’t think they currently have this on the website but a small part of me is hoping they’ll add it and name it the Melissa, or something like that. 😉 Kinda like getting a sandwich named after you but in the home decor world.

It turned out so great and I was so thankful they let me be creative and create this custom hexagon design. Hexagons are special to us because and we use a lot of bee and honeycomb imagery as a symbol in our marriage and home. I love have this bright, bold, colorful reminder in a room that previously had not much happiness going on in it.

I shared all about installing these (they were all individual!) in my stories on instagram (it’s saved in my highlights under the laundry room so go check it out!)

Anyone want a before and after?

Everything is just so clean and tidy! I mean, I did get rid of a lot of clutter from in here, but we also managed to cleverly hide a lot of it, while making the room more functional and more beautiful. And it was really not that expensive. The biggest expense was the cabinets from Ikea. Everything else was probably less than $200. That’s the perfect renovation in my opinion!

Basically, this laundry room is bringing me all the laundry joy right now.

So, I’m going to go do a load of cloth diapers with a giant grin on my face the whole time. Thanks for following along and let me know if you have any questions about sourcing or DIY projects we did in here! I’d love to see you all give your laundry rooms some love, too!

*I realize a laundry cart might not SEEM life changing, but if it brings joy to a pretty mundane task that I do multiple times a week, I call that life changing. Here is the post on how Wyatt built it. But to quote Reading Rainbow, you don’t have to take my word for it. You can just build it and decide for yourself if your life is changed. 🙂 And here is the post about the wooden shelf!