My laundry room has been kind of a train wreck since we bought our home, 11 years ago. It feels like it was an add-on to the house, without a whole lot of thought going into the actual function of said laundry room, and we’ve pretty much hated it the entire time we’ve lived here.
We’ve talked about tearing out walls and moving the whole thing to the garage, but in the end it just sits next to the family room, the object of our loathing and the butt of all the jokes at the dinner table.
I do, in fact, realize this is a first world problem, don’t get me wrong. I understand there are far bigger issues in the world than whether or not I’m able to fit a laundry basket next to the washer and dryer I’m lucky to have, in my home. I get it. But let’s for a minute focus on my own selfishness in wanting a functional laundry room.
A perfect example of the weird non-function of my laundry room is the weird sink shoved in-between the washer and a modesty wall shielding an afterthought of a toilet. The sink, maybe 8 inches across and about a foot deep, is totally useless. Once in a while a paintbrush or some kitchen rags get thrown into it, if only because there’s nowhere else in our house to put random stuff.
I hate it. I’d rather have a full sink or none at all than the cheap-o dollhouse sink we’re stuck with now.
A handful of years ago we replaced a fluorescent, white plastic, rectangle of an corporate office light fixture that covered part of the laundry room.
Do you remember the movie ‘Joe vs The Volcano’? There’s a scene in the beginning where Tom Hanks has the ever-loving life sucked out of him by one of those flickering fluorescent nightmares before he sets off to leave that nonsense behind.
That’s how the laundry room light was, before we replaced that PDQ with an IKEA light fixture. I also scraped sunflower stickers and ivy wallpaper off the walls before painting them a pretty apple green.
We didn’t have the budget to do much else while we were focusing on other areas of the house, like our master bathroom remodel, which took the better part of a year and all our monies. So we left it as is.
I maybe accidentally, on purpose, (in anger) got paint all over the crappy vinyl so we’d be forced to replace it sooner than later. It just made it more ugly.
The add-on “bathroom” is a whole other disaster. I painted all the exposed pipe the same color of the walls, hoping it would recede into the background a little. It sort of helped. Why would you leave pipe exposed when you’re the one building the house?
We may never know.
There’s a whole passel of random shelves above the barely functioning toilet, which of course we filled completely with crap crafts.
There’s not really enough room to dry clothes, but we gave it our best shot with a drying rack from Costco which is too big to unfold completely, and falls down on the regular.
I also attempted to make a mud room / coat rack / swim gear area (laundry nook) in the laundry room for my kids by throwing in a thrift store bench, along with some plastic organizing bins and an ‘as-is’ coat hanger from IKEA. It has worked really well, considering.
Recently though, we realized we had leftover flooring from the master bathroom remodel and no time some time one weekend and decided to tear the whole thing apart.
It was a terrible but great idea, and in the end, (because that’s usually how it works) it will all look awesome. Or better than it did anyway. We can all hope.
The ‘after’ photos of our little laundry room makeover coming right up!
Allison
Hello there! I'm Allison Czarnecki, founder + editor of Petit Elefant, a blog all about style on a budget for every part of your life: style / home / travel / family. I do a lot of how-to beauty + style tutorials, travel posts, easy recipes, home remodel projects, and cool DIY crafts you totally want to try. I'm super happily married (to a hot Polish immigrant) and am the mother of two kids, a daughter and son, all of whom are featured here on the regular. We live in the country but we're a little bit rock + roll. Welcome!
Hey. It’s better than mine. I’ve got a washer and hot water heater-sized alcove in the main hall. The doors are falling off despite multiple fixes. Yup. I’ve developed a hatred for them. Oh. And by the way, we have a 25 year old new (to us) dryer because the inside A. wasn’t wired correctly for it and B. there’s no room for it. So the dryer sits out in the shed, rusting away while I hang laundry outside…;o) There’s always someone who has it worse than you. But hey, we’ve saved lots of dryer money and the clothes come out whiter (though with more lint) and hanging clothes gives me time to work out book plots in my head. That’s one good thing about very little snow or rainfall.
Can’t wait to see the finished product!!!