Paint Can Fix It: The Laundry Room

When we bought the house the laundry room looked like this.

It is big and has a lot of room...so it has that going for it.

It also had:

Really dirty walls, mold spots on one wall, two layers of peel and stick tiles, a shelf that was too high to reach (and what may give you some kind of disease if you touch it), and lovely curtains.

It wasn't horrible but it wasn't great either. I definitely didn't like doing laundry in there because it just didn't feel like the the clothes were going to get clean.

Dirty by association?

We moved in the furniture that we wanted in there. My desk, our washer and dryer, the stand up freezer stayed and we added the fridge from the upstairs.

The laundry room evolved into the "drop all" for our house.

The desk normally held tools, there were buckets on the floor,

...lots of random things everywhere.

Our air conditioner decided to stop working and one day we came home to a puddle of water in our laundry room.

So I pulled up some of the peel and stick tiles to make sure that there was no water left beneath them.

I think the tiles on the bottom were original to the house and the ones on top were probably added in the 80's. Either way...there was a lot of crap left on them. No amount of scrubbing was going to clean them.

Ripping up a floor is quite liberating.

But then I was posed with the problem of what to do when the tiles were all removed.

I needed a game plan.

I gave Blake two options:

1. I could paint the floor in a checkerboard pattern--the same as upstairs--and light grey walls, or

2. I could paint it like this pinterest picture.

Would you believe me if I said that Blake picked the pinterest one?

Because....he did.

I picked up some paint samples at Home Depot and lived with them for a day or two before I settled on a color.

Then I started to tear up the floor.

It occurred to me pretty quickly that we were going to have to do this in zones. Moving both the washer and dryer out, plus the fridge and the stand up freezer was not an option.

I striped the walls,

primed the floors

and then applied the floor paint.

Always making sure to leave a path...

When the floor was dry, I moved back the fridge and freezer and started on the other side of the room.

Since I was priming the floors anyways the doors got a coat of primer and two coats of white paint.

We got some cabinets for free off of KSL (Utah's craigslist), and Blake hung them for me.

Although I realize that pink stripes aren't everyone's bag...they make me happy.

Since I am the one doing laundry here...I am the one that has to like them.

The cabinets are still going to get a coat of white paint too.

My friend April bought this vintage circus tray for me...I think I am going to hang it on the wall above the desk, but for now, I look at it lovingly on my window sill.