The new laundry room!

The new laundry room!

You may remember, this terrifying place is where we used to do laundry:

Eek!

Since we had our washer and dryer moved out of the scary basement and into our large pantry off the kitchen, this is where we do laundry now:

Yay!

Looking good! The cute pendant lights are Pottery Barn Metal Bells in black (on sale for only $39.99!).

Ok, it doesn’t look like a whole lot … YET. But we have tons of plans for this space! Our pantry is 4.5 feet wide x 12 feet long, so it’s a really useful space to have so close to the kitchen. Our goal is to make it super practical and all about storage/storage/storage. “Built-in” bookcases, open shelves, maybe a pegboard, hooks for coats, a bench for taking off boots — we have a lot of ideas for all the ways we want to use this space.

Here’s some of our plans:

1. We want to add shelves or a cabinet above the washer and dryer, so we have a convenient place to put laundry soap, dryer sheets, and all those other laundry supplies. We haven’t decided yet if we want to build our own shelves or if we’re going to buy something like a Billy wall shelf from Ikea.

2. We’re going to put a countertop across the top of the washer and dryer, probably made out of plywood.

3. Remember there used to be a door here, on the right? (Click here for the before pictures of the pantry.) There weren’t any baseboards there, of course, and our crew also had to cut out the baseboards on the left side to fit the washer. There’s about one foot of missing baseboards on each side, so we’re going to add them back in. Luckily, they saved the baseboards that they cut out for us, so it’s just a matter of cutting them down and nailing them back in.

4. Obviously this room is in desperate need of a coat of paint. We want to use the same color we used in the kitchen and hallway (Valspar’s Seashell Gray) to make the whole space feel cohesive and kind of open it all up.

5. I want to make some curtains for this window, and ultimately we want to remove the shutters from the exterior to get some natural light in this room.

6. We’re going to add a wall of “built-in” bookcases to hold all of our pantry goods — non-perishable foods, baking pans, seasonal dishes, all those things that we don’t need to have in the kitchen all the time. Our plan is to buy some white Ikea Billy bookcases and add moulding to give them a built-in look. We can fit two 31.5-inch bookcases along that wall, between the door and washing machine, and still have a little extra space for maybe something like a peg board if we want.

7. In the corner, to the right of the window, we want to make a little “mud room/mud corner” with coat hooks, boot storage, maybe even a bench to sit on to take off your boots. This area is just around the corner from our back door so it will be a convenient place to hang our stuff… instead of throwing our coats on a chair in the TV room like we do now!

This is so exciting! I love how many possibilities there are with this space and how much we will be able to use it. I love the idea of a really practical room full of storage opportunities — but yet also totally cute, of course.

I did my first load of laundry in here yesterday and swear I didn’t stop smiling the whole time!!

— Kerry