Laundry Room Makeover

When we moved into our house we had a surprisingly short list of things that we wanted to change about it. Our house was empty for a year before we bought it so we bad pretty much a blank canvas to work with and we were very fortunate in that there were very few things we HAD to do when we moved in.  We painted our bedroom and the living room, and put in gas logs (best thing we ever did!), and moved in 2 days after we had the keys in our possession.  Like many homeowners, the longer we've lived there the more changes we've decided to make. In the three years we've lived here, we have painted the kitchen, hung the tv over the mantle, and painted the"hallway" from the living room to the other 2 bedrooms to match the living room.  I use the term hallway very loosely.  It's a square space that has 5 doors and one tiny wall that is not worth hanging anything on. This meant that as of last summer we were able to say that we checked off everything we wanted to do to the house. Yay!

But then we started thinking, and Eric started brainstorming (which means something is going to happen since he is not just a schemer, he is doer, and once gets and idea in his head it is almost always going to come to fruition). We decided that the laundry room could use a little face-lift.  Our laundry room not only serves as a laundry room, but also as an entry way of sorts since we rarely use our front door and our car port is behind our house. My only stipulation? Do NOT remove my laundry room door. He was convinced he would have to, but we were able to find a way around it. =)

Ok enough talking about the whys and hows...I am going to let the pictures do the talking. The pictures on the left are the "befores" and the pictures on the right are the "afters."

This is looking at the wall where we keep our keys and what not.  The door with the blinds is our back door and the other one is the door that I could not let go of to the kitchen.

This is the wall where the washer and dryer are. Cabinets = no clutter! 

The "other wall." This is what you see when you first walk in our back door.  It doesn't even look like the same room to me and I LOVE it! We moved the rack from the washer/dryer wall to this side so I'd still have a place to hang clothes dog leashes. 

I am still shocked at the difference the changes make in this room. And it makes me so happy every time I walk in the house. =)  I am so glad to be done with that ugly eggshell color on the walls.  Our entire house was that color when we moved in, but I am slowly but surely removing it one room at a time.  I picked out the paint color on a whim on Saturday morning, and am really happy with how it looks.

While the cabinets were going up my job was to stay out of the way, so I decided to see what kinds of decorating ideas I could stir up on pinterest.  Since I had no idea we were tackling this project until the day before, I really had not had time to think about decorating. I found a couple of ideas and ran with them and I really love what I ended up with.

The black signs are pieces of wood I purchased at Michaels and JoAnn's for less than $10 per board (with 40% off coupons!).  I painted them with chalkboard paint, and wrote the words on myself with chalk.  The pants phrasing I found on pinterest, but Eric was the one who suggested the sock phrase.  I love love love them!  I want to add a little container to the one with our name on it to put chalk in so people can leave messages like they used to do on the white board (see before pic above).  I hot glued white ribbon to the backs to hang them. The laundry sign and the giant safety pin were Hobby Lobby finds.  I saw some giant safety pins on pinterest and fell in love with them.  I was going to order some but decided to check Hobby Lobby first, and hit the jackpot!  I made the key holder myself last week, and the last thing I added last weekend was the rug.  Eric highjacked my front door rug a couple of weeks ago because our old back door rug bit the dust.  Not only did it not match, my front door was getting lonely, so I was excited to find one that matched so well. 

 I think the craziest part of this is that we did all of it (except for the accents which were finished up later that week) in ONE day. Paint, cabinets, reorganizing....done last Sunday.  I still can't believe we did it that fast, but I am so glad we did!

Now onto the next project.........=)