New Laundry Room

I don't know if any of you have seen or remember our laundry room....but disgustingly ugly and messy are 2 words that would fit it quite well. Thankfully it's toward the back of the house and the only people that saw it were those who went through the garage. Unfortunately, people saw it when they went through the garage. The biggest problems with our laundry room is it had wire racks. I LOATH wire racks. I know they are cheap and that's why the builder installed them but it just can't carry much weight. Most of our closets have these and if you have kids, you know they are going to try to climb them to get to something and of course they are going to break. Hate these things! There was no way I was taking a picture of our laundry room with the junk and mess on the racks so here is a picture of just the racks.

Another problem with our Laundry room was way back in early December we had a leak in our laundry room floor. The plumbers had to jackhammer our floor out and put a hole in the wall to repair the pin size leak in a pipe. Please know that I am totally embarrassed by this picture. Who knew that in a year so much lint and junk could accumulate under and behind a wash machine and dryer? Yuck!

Yet another problem with our laundry room was the lack of light. Who would install such a tiny microscopic light in a laundry room? Well, it certainly wasn't a genius....or anyone who actually did laundry. I guess this picture doesn't do much justice. Imagine the size of a salad bowl...yes, that is how small this light fixture was.

So, you have seen the problems, here are the fixes. This project was one of my favorites (my most favorite project was working on our kitchen). It's one of my favorites because just like our kitchen remodel it has been such a huge improvement. First up, New Flooring. We had some leftover Vinyl tile from our bathrooms. The reason this has taken so long to repair was that we just couldn't agree with what to put in. I didn't want the Vinyl, I wanted to put Pergo flooring back in and Kelly wanted the Vinyl. We are contemplating maybe putting Slate in (some day in the far, far, far, far, far, far off future) after seeing some friend's beautiful Slate floor, but it's just not doable right now. So, as a temporary flooring option until Slate is doable or until we decide we want something else the Vinyl Tile was installed. It actually looks amazingly better than it did and goes with the rest of our house. You really can't tell in the picture but we grouted the vinyl tiles and they look a lot like real tiles until you step on them in bear feet in the winter and your feet aren't cold.

Second Fix, new bigger brighter light fixture. There are now 120 watts of bright light. Woo Hoo! It's amazing that I can actually see stains on clothes now and pre-treat them. Even our clothes are looking better because we have more light. Who knew?

Third and biggest fix, We installed a cabinet door to hide the kids games and added wood shelving for the cleaners and chemicals. We did add the bead board to the cabinet doors to match the kitchen. We bought door pulls but just haven't put them on yet. I love my new laundry room. No more messes. Things are more organized. What could be better? Oh, we also put crown moulding as well. Amazing how much more beautiful a little crown moulding can make a room. Love it!