Favorite Project of 2009? Laundry Room Re-Do

Rhoda over at Southern Hospitality is hosting a Top Projects of 2009 as a showcase of all of our best projects over this past year. Hands down my favorite project has to be the Laundry Room that my husband and I redid. It is really one of the first projects that I blogged about and really helped renew my interest in improving our house. And it is so fitting that Rhoda is hosting this Showcase because she is the of writer of the blog Southern Hospitality that inspired me enough to take action! And she inspired me with this photo of her own Laundry Room.

This is the photo that started it all! This is Rhoda’s Laundry Room.

I was stunned at how “pretty” her laundry room was and if you click here: Rhoda’s Southern Hospitality Laundry Room, you can see more of it. What was so wonderful to me was how kind and encouraging Rhoda was. She told her readers how she did it and she even gave us the name of the color of paint she used! “Grass Cloth” by Behr! How could I forget. I was at Home Depot later the same day getting myself a gallon.

Here is where we started:

After 8 years of living here our laundry room was still the same “builder beige” it was the day we moved it. It was the catch all room. The dumping ground.

There was so much clutter and stuff you could barely get in it to do the the actual laundry. It was beyond UGLY!!

The best thing we did was remove the center doors of the cabinets and we turned it into a book shelf for my cookbooks. After removing the doors we needed to borrow a reciprocating saw to remove a vertical wood bar in the center that the cabinet doors met up against. First time for using that tool!

Then we got ourselves a Mitre Box (very inexpensive…I think we paid around $7.00 for it.) and some decorative trim molding that we painted black and we framed the center section with it. It is my favorite part of the room. We also used the Mitre Box to cut the skinnier trim molding and painted it white to frame each of the cabinet doors. We used “Liquid Nails” to attach all the molding to the cabinets. New door knobs as well to finish them off.

I found a piece of decorative trim that I painted black and we used “Liquid Nails” to attach it to the front of the sink.

I was able to decorate the top of the cabinets completely with items from my storage room that I loved but couldn’t find a home for until the laundry room re-do presented itself!

And finally a place for my basket of red geraniums.

And all those sports schedules that I use to tape to the cabinets…I now tape them to the inside of the cabinet doors…accessible but out of sight.

Of course the fun part of any room is when it starts to come together with the decorating and accessorizing. A new valence for the window, and I made some art collages for the walls, and I found a beautiful hand painted floor cloth with the black and white checks that I love saving us, at least for now, from re-tiling the floor with black and white tiles. (That is another project for another day perhaps. :)) A little bit of shopping at TJ Maxx and Hobby Lobby for the bulletin board and plate holder and I was in business!

Now I still can’t say doing the laundry is a “pleasure” but it is certainly much less painful in our finally new and improved Laundry Room.

Thanks Rhoda for hosting such a great event. It was fun to organize my many Laundry Room posts and photos all into one post. Looking forward to seeing what everyone else posts as their best for 2009.