Our 1960s house was fairly updated when we purchased it, however in the back lower level corner something ugly was lurking: an insanely drab laundry room. If you felt blah about doing laundry in the first place, our laundry room would have certainly made sure your mood stayed that way.
Muted vanilla yellow beige walls were garnished with old particleboard and wire shelving that I was scared of overloading. The previous owners had a freezer chest in the room, which was a great idea if you need the freezer space. We, however, didn’t need that. Driven by its blah-ness, and inspired by a mental image of cornflowers, we set out to remodel our laundry room.
I always love picking out paint colors and the folks at Blackhawk Hardware were a great help. We picked up a few Benjamin Moore paint samples in Swiss Blue, Aqua Marine, and Brazilian Blue and eventually chose Aqua Marine.
Swiss Blue
Aqua Marine
Brazilian Blue
The plan was to remove the shelves, repaint, install a new ceiling lamp and window treatment and add cabinets for storage. Sounds easy enough. To kick off the laundry room make-over, I grabbed an electric drill and demolished the offending shelves. Totally as if I were on a renovation show on TV – minus the cameras, glamour, and added drama. Oh wait, I guess there was drama. After that, the wall looked as if someone had shot into it – so many holes! Since we had some drywall repair to do in a few other spots of the house we figured we’d hire someone to take care of that at the same time. But first, we had to take care of some quirky thing: The outlets were all just about at counter height so since we wanted to install cabinets either way you looked at it, they were in the way. So after quite a bit of finagling they were moved (nothing’s ever easy in an old house) and a new lamp went into the ceiling. The drywall repair / painter came out and very quickly patched everything up and painted the walls. Prettttty!
Next we ordered storage room cabinets. They were delivered, we hauled them downstairs, and then hauled them back upstairs and into our cars to return them since on second thought their blah-level was still quite high. They looked cheap and the grey was not a good choice with the pretty cornflower blue walls. After hours of research we decided on a line of kitchen cabinets and after more hours of thinking about configuration we ordered those. A couple of days later, the cabinets arrived. Pretty! Except, the door of the full-length cabinet was snapped in half. (Insert sad trombone noise here) No problem, we called, they sent a new door. Problem. That door’s corner was broken off. Oh bad packaging, I can sing many a song about you. Long story short, it took 5 (!) tries to get a good-enough door.
The other cabinets had long gone up even though we had the challenge of making perfectly right-angled cabinets fit into what turned out to be not quite 90 degree corners. But look at how pretty everything looks now that the cabinet door has completed the set!
All’s well that ends well but that was quite a bit more excitement and took quite a bit longer than we had anticipated. In my eyes, it was all worth it. I love walking into our fresh and friendly laundry room and the dreaded task of doing laundry has actually become something that makes me smile.
