Laundry Room Reveal

The laundry room is officially finished.  Don't I look so happy to be doing laundry now?!!  We had some functional and aesthetic concerns in this room.

Our laundry room is actually located between our kitchen and family room.  When we changed all the flooring in those rooms to be the wood grain tile, we planned to carry it into this room too.  The current flooring was a beige tile floor that was actually falling apart, so we had to replace it regardless.

The old cabinets were original to the house and a poor grade wood/plywood, so we planned to tear them out.

We had differing opinions on how we would replace them.  Originally I wanted to paint and reuse the cabinets we had torn out from the kitchen.  My husband wanted all new cabinets.  When we tore down the cabinets we found some lovely wallpaper, an abandoned light fixture in the ceiling, and an abandoned vent in the wall.

With all that going on, we decided to order new cabinets from IKEA so we could get the exact size we needed to cover up all the existing surprises we found.  We created some shelving in the middle to house our laundry detergent.

The original hookups for the washer and dryer were placed so that with our particular washer and dryer the doors opened into each other.  We could adjust the dryer door so that they opened in the same direction, but I really wanted them to open opposite so that we had a clear path from the washer to the dryer.  That meant changing the location of our washer and dryer and creating extensions for the hookups.  Let's just say it was a little more work than we thought.  Functionally it works great now.

We also wanted the washer and dryer up on platforms so that it was easier to load and unload laundry.  Jesse created a very solid wood structure platform for them to sit on and then I stained it to match the flooring.

My favorite feature of the new laundry room is how we decided to tackle the drying rack.  We had originally mounted a shelf with a rod to dry our clothes.  That shelf made the room feel claustrophobic when doing laundry.

So we now have a hidden drying rod in the cabinet.

That's a wrap on the laundry room.  Now we will just continue to work with the kids on doing their own laundry, they are both getting pretty close to accomplishing this goal.