Nice and Clean Laundry Room Update

Andrea at Willow Wisp Cottage recently updated her laundry room.  See how nice it is.


We recently redid our laundry room and I have one question: Why did we wait so long?

I love the result. It is clean, functional, and looks so much better! Unfortunately I don't have any before shots, but imagine a room with old laminate flooring, walls the colour of bandaids, old cabinets with the door barely hanging on as the hinges had long since broken, a nasty dirty old sink and old washer/dryer that sounded possessed when it was used. Yuck. So here's what we did:

You can see a snippette of the floor in this shot. We replaced the old nasty laminate with slate tiles. This room is a laundry/mud room and our entrance off the garage. It gets good and dirty on a regular basis, and this floor is fantastic for hiding the grunge until I can wash it.

One great thing about this room was that the previous owners of the house had installed the beadboard. We painted over the old bandaid colour. The bottom is Marble White, and the top is Nordic Grey, both from Benjamin Moore. I bought the large laundry basket at Canadian Tire, but added the decorative fabric trim myself.

We had the cabinets completely replaced as they were falling apart. Our cabinet maker convinced us to go with natural Maple, although I had originally wanted cream to match our kitchen. I don't mind the look (it's growing on me), but he's probably right in that it will be more durable (won't chip) and is easier to keep clean. He did build the upper cabinets very low which is great for internal storage, but makes use of the new countertop a little tricky. I had originally envisioned cute canisters here, but I really only have room for these few low baskets.

We removed the possessed ancient washer/dryer and replaced them with these lovely front loaders. This allowed us to put a countertop over top. While some choose not to do this, as the countertop height is higher than standard, I LOVE it! It gives me room to fold laundry and somewhere to put my junk when I come in from the garage.

I bought these baskets at Canadian Tire, and added the fabric cuff to them to pretty them up. I found the monogram tags at Michael's. It's a great way to keep organized. One basket per family member. No more mixed up mittens, hats, scarves etc.
I painted and distressed this piece of oak trim, and added hooks to use for our multitude of keys.

The closet didn't have any doors on it when we moved in, and I decided to keep it that way. While it does reveal the not so pretty coats and shoes, this is a mudroom afterall, and functionality has won out. It is a small room, and closing off the closet, plus the awkwardness of the doors just didn't appeal. I added this cute phrase above the closet door.

The deep utility sink was a great deal from Home Depot, and the faucet is lovely. I bought it at a 75% off sale. I love the fact that there is a pretty faucet in the laundry room, rather than the cracked, horrible faucet that was here previously. You know, the kind that has 20 years of gunge on it, and has a plastic spray nozzel that barely works?

I asked our cabinet maker to instal the same large crown in this room as he did in the kitchen. I just didn't add the rope detail to it. My new memo board now hangs proudly in this room.

We have also been painting all the doors and baseboards throughout the house, and changing all the brass door knobs to pewter knobs. We've been doing this slowly as we make our way from room to room. The cost certainly adds up, but it makes such a huge difference to the look of the house!

Nice and clean, I like it!  Thoughts?