Laundry Room Reveal

After 3 weeks, I managed to finish just one room of our new home in Indiana, the laundry room! If you’ve seen our empty home tour or saw this IG post, you know that our appliances were stolen before we moved into our home, so even though I don’t like doing laundry, being able to get new appliances motivated me to really make this room special. Special thank you to Lowe’s for gifting me the laundry appliances, and thank you to everyone who tagged them on social!

Before we get into the full laundry reveal, let’s check out the before. It’s a decent size and already had a corner cut out specifically for the washer and dryer. The previous owners had a tall cabinet in the corner that we got rid of so we could start from scratch. We could have left it like this, but I was itching to do SOMETHING in this house since our bedroom and living room furniture were taking a while to ship.

And here’s what it looks like now!

In true form, I’ve decided to use black, white, and wood as the design base for nearly every room in the house. I knew these white laundry fixtures would provide a great neutral base, and then it was a matter of deciding between white shelves or wooden shelves for additional storage. Once I discovered the Boaxel system at IKEA, I knew it would make the perfect storage system for our laundry and cleaning needs in this room.

The biggest transformation was the flooring. First, we had the grout cleaned, but I still wasn’t satisfied with the brown and tan tiles, so I picked up some peel and stick tiles from Target that completely transformed the room. I started in the middle and worked my way out — some tiles took me 10 seconds to lay down and others took me 10 minutes with all the cutting and measuring and double-checking!

Since the laundry room is directly off the garage entrance, I knew that I also wanted to create a space where we could sit and remove our shoes, since we operate a shoe-free household. I went between a storage bench and a regular bench for a while, but decided to do a regular bench that can be repurposed as a dining bench when my family comes over for Thanksgiving and we need extra seating — talk about planning ahead!

I’ve been wanting to paint an arch for a while, and have also been wanting to support a Black-owned paint company, Clare Paint. I got a bunch of swatches and thought that Blackish would work for a few different spaces — the front door, the living room niches, etc. Painting the arch was easy — I just found the middle, used a pencil tied to a string to draw the semi-circle, and filled in the lines! It’s not perfect but you really can’t tell, and I love how it perfectly frames our wall hooks, where we’ll hang up coats and jackets and bags.

I’m really glad that I started with the laundry room as my first room makeover. Since a lot of furniture is backed up, it’s been frustrating waiting for some of the bigger pieces in a house that most people usually start with — the bedroom, couch, etc. But now the laundry room is done and I find myself enjoying the moments I spend there putting on my shoes before heading out the door!

The only additional things I might add to this space are a wooden counter on top of the washer & dryer to use for folding and a piece of art right above the left side of the washer. Gotta leave some room for some future thrifted or DIY projects to provide some character!