Our Functional Laundry Makeover Progress

We’ve moved a lot in the last eight years and four cities together, and not once have we ever had a true laundry room. We’ve had laundry closets or nooks, and once we had a dryer in our basement that was leaking gas in our house and we didn’t know, but a big draw of our new house was the fairly sizable laundry right off the back door that I immediately envisioned as laundry/utility room/mudroom after our laundry makeover.

I want the vibe to be a little modern vintage (is that an oxymoron?), with some fun color and most importantly: it has to be functional. We’re now about two months into this room’s makeover and it’s slow going (on account of, you know, being heavily pregnant when we moved and now with a newborn in the house), but it’s looking so much better than it was and it’s at the point we can start to envision the finished space.

Let’s recap what we’ve done so far and what’s left to go.

Before our laundry makeover

I’m not sure how this laundry looked originally, but it made absolutely terrible use of the space. There was what looked like a closet on one side of the room – surely this wasn’t used as a bedroom at any point? – and the side-by-side washer and dryer made it hard to utilize the vertical space above the appliances.

There were holes where cabinets once were and a few haphazardly placed upper cabinets that left some pretty big patchwork to be done when they came down.

Making a blank slate

This laundry is the first time we’ve ever truly made over a room from the ground up, taking everything out and starting fresh. We took down the cabinets, Alex tore apart the weird demony closet, we bought a new stackable washer and dryer (which honestly wasn’t in the plan/budget but we quickly realized the existing dryer’s heating element was broken) and Alex spontaneously tore up the floor tile.

Cute bistro tile and a big ol’ cabinet

We leveled out the floors (here’s a tutorial on this because we honestly felt like total badasses leveling our own floors), laid this cute white tile, and assembled this large utility closet we’re using as a cleaning closet.

The ultimate goal is for the far wall to act as the mudroom with a bench and some hooks, so we built a base out of scrap 2x4s and plywood to mount the utility closet on top of. We had to do that so the cabinet doors wouldn’t open into the future bench, but above it, and we’ll likely keep some baskets in the bottom portion for extra storage. It’s already been such a game changer to have that big closet for all the cleaning stuff like the mop and vacuum, plus random things like air filters and the beach bag.

We then filled out the remaining space between the large cabinet and the appliances with additional shaker cabinets and topped them with butcher block (that we’re yet to stain and secure in place).

What’s next in the laundry makeover

So that’s where we’re at now with the laundry makeover and probably will be for a little while as we take a break to work on making up a quick guest room space for some family visiting in a few weeks. But, once we get back to it, we’ll patch all the drywall spots that need attention, paint the cabinets a fun color, add the hooks and a bench for the mudroom element, build around the washer and dryer to make it look more custom, and – if I can finally convince Alex – add some wallpaper to the back wall as a focal element.

Alex has been against wallpaper since the dawn of time but I figure what better room to have some fun than a laundry? You might as well try something to make it more appealing!

Ideally with the laundry makeover, we’d also love to add a utility sink to the countertop space under the window so we’re in the process of getting quotes to have another water line run and determine if that’s in the budget. That’d be such a big functionality change to do things like rinse muddy clothes, soak laundry, or refill the dogs’ water bowls every day right there in the laundry.

This room has come so far in just the last few weeks and it’s amazing how big of a difference you can make by just moving around the layout of a space.

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