Some of you have probably been thinking…why on Earth does she care about her laundry room enough to spend countless hours ripping it apart and putting it together again?!
Well the answer to that issssss I don’t know. Haha, kidding. The laundry room is the first thing you see when you walk in the back door of our house, and everyone comes through the back door. We rarely use our front door at all!
Also, as much as I loathe laundry… I do spend quite a bit of time in this particular room of our house, whether I like it or not.
We have a lot of WOOD in our house, and while a lot of people think it’s pretty, it hurts my eye balls. I just think it looks so dated and gives our house such an outdated feel.
I love a good LIGHT/BRIGHT/CLEAN look for any room of the home, which is why we decided to paint the built-ins a bright white, and put some white shiplap on the walls.
Here are a few pictures of the before:
Painting these built-ins was NOT. easy. It took soooo many coats– way more than we originally thought. We also tried several different kinds of paint, so it’s basically a paint cocktail of sorts. But what ended up working the best was a Valspar latex interior/exterior paint.
I got a ton of questions about the shiplap. We’ve done shiplap in a ton of different places of our home and always use actual white shiplap boards that you can get at most hardware stores. They’re designed specifically to create this look easily (see below), and basically all you need in addition to the boards is either glue or a nail gun. We always use a nail gun!
Another thing we did was remove the super old looking door on the mini closet of the built-ins. It had a super dated look, so Peter removed that and redid it to look more like a “barn door.” I was actually super excited about his idea to do this and think it helped modernize the space a bit!
-
Before
-
After
My very skilled husband also removed the ugly white shelf that sat above the washer and dryer and replaced it with a real piece of cherry wood that he randomly just had in the barn. He stained it and I think it turned out beautiful!
Additional improvements:
*Updated all the hardware to black to contrast strongly with all the new white
*Added a towel bar on the back wall to be able to hang wet clothing (can hang straight on the bar, or can hang from hangers here)!
*Replaced bottom storage bins with nicer ones from Michael’s
*Purchased a new rug from Target
*Hung a new plant in the corner to bring in some color (got this one from Homegoods!)
*Purchased nice new glass containers and baskets from the Container Store
Here are some pictures of the AFTER! If you have any specific questions about how we did anything I mentioned above, please leave a comment and I will get back to you ASAP!
Oh and thank you to my adorable sleepy husband that is always down to help me with any project my crazy little mind thinks up. You’re the Chip to my Joanna and I love you!
