Everyday I’m Demoing

For those of you who follow us on Instagram (and if you’re not you should…you’re missing out…hashtag shameless plug) you may have caught this little gem of a laundry room makeover:

And I know what you’re thinking, it’s something along the lines of….”Oh em gee…what happened to your laundry room?!”  “Where did the metal cabinets and ugly yellow plaid wallpaper go?!”  “Did you move?!  Cuz this CAN’T be the same laundry room?!”  Right?!  The Instagram photo isn’t of a completely finished laundry room.  We’re still amidst a slew of minor tweaks.  But it’s a vast improvement from the laundry room of yore:

And then there’s this nook complete with two boxes of laminate flooring waiting to be installed for oh…say….since March.

The ugly didn’t stop there…just wait until you see the smorgasbord of stuff shoved into those metal…yes…metal cabinets.

And can you blame us for ditching this light fixture?  It only worked about 38% of the time.  17% of the time it worked, it took over 20 minutes to warm up.  Can you even buy light bulbs like this anymore?

A laundry room makeover wasn’t high on our project priority list.  We had enough half-finished, more pressing projects to tackle.  Like ripped apart porches, master closet doors, and fall garden work.  But alas, one Saturday in September during laundry day it came down to the last straw sock lost behind the dryer.  I flipped.  Everything started coming out of the laundry room….cleaning supplies, laundry detergent, our secret stash of red Solo cups.  It was time.  The space was ugly, dysfunctional, and unorganized…the perfect in-need-of-a-remodel trifecta.  Colby reluctantly grabbed a pry bar and helped me literally take everything out of the laundry room.

We may have taken it a little too far…and ripped out the kitchen ceiling too while we were at it.  We’ve been wanting to replace the entire ceiling (kitchen, laundry room, and entry) with planking and it would be a good time to replace all the wiring in the space too (the permit is pulled and work is in progress!).  So out it came…all of that textured ceiling nastiness.

But back to the laundry room.  Our kitchen and laundry room were an addition to our home circa 1976.  We know.  We found the date on the wall after taking down some paneling.  Thus, all the walls were sheetrock unlike the rest of our house which sported plaster and lathe.  We didn’t need to take down the walls/reinsulate in here so we just patched up the damaged areas with drywall compound, later sanding down all the patches.

That’s my I’m-faking-enthusiasm-but-really-despise-this-work-and-have-drywall-dust-in-my-ears-and-nose face.  There was a ton of patching to do.  We discovered the sheetrock underneath the paneling and wallpaper hadn’t been primed, had maybe one coat of mud on the seams, and some of the sheetrock didn’t even line up.  That left us with swaying, crumbling, pretty heavily damaged walls requiring about an entire 5-gallon bucket of mud and nearly three weeks’ worth of mudding, drying, sanding, and repeat.  Mudding is not our favorite.  Neither is sanding.  But we powered through.

We did install the planked ceiling before painting and moving things back in but that’s another post for another day.  We also installed the laminate flooring.  And be we I really mean Colby here.  There wasn’t enough flooring to do the whole space.  Just our luck we bought a discontinued flooring (doh) so there was no buying more.  Since we do intend on installing real wood flooring within the next year, replacing the laminate, we just rolled with our lack of flooring for now and only installed it where it would be visible.

Meanwhile…in the rest of the house…

The thing I hate most about remodeling is that your remodel doesn’t just affect the one space you’re working on.  In our house, just about every other surface in every other room of the house takes a beating.  Our kitchen was destroyed along with our dining room:

Once the walls were as smooth as a baby’s butt, or as close to it as we could get, the walls were primed and painted.  Lately, I’ve been drooling over all white spaces.  Just go take one look at my Pinterest boards and you’ll see it.  I love how fabulous an all-white space looks once you layer in some color, wood tones, and texture.  I can’t get enough of those layered spaces.  I’ve been wanting to give it a try so decided the laundry room would be a great safe space to give white walls a whirl.

I know, I know.  A laundry room is a great space to be experimenting with bright colors or dark jewel tones but at least I’m still stepping outside my normal comfort zone and trying something different.  My different just happens to be white.

Most of the trim in our house is painted with Valspar’s Betsy’s Linen.  Since I’m a Benjamin Moore convert, I had the shade color matched and painted both the trim and walls in the Benjamin Moore equivalent of Betsy’s Linen (gloss for the trim and satin for the walls).  Even the window got a quick paint job.

After everything was painted, the trim was installed, everything was caulked up, and the washer and dryer were moved back in, I knew the white was the right choice.  I was already in love without layering in any other wood tones or textures.  It’s making me fight off the urge to repaint all the walls in our home white.  Next up, ceiling planking, shelving, and organizing…oh my.