Our teeny tiny laundry room makeover

In our house our laundry "room" is more like a laundry "closet" right smack dab in our dinning room. I try to keep the doors to the washer and dryer closed because all the cleaning products and extra boxes of Kleenex on the top shelf, along with the fact that our dryer door is glass so you can see our clean laundry sitting right there, waiting to be folded -- it's all a perfect combination for making my kitchen and dining room look cluttered and messy even when they're not. I would often get frustrated while in there because there was zero organization, the dingy yellow overhead light bummed me out, and because I'm in there at least once a day starting a load, or switching over a load, or taking a load out to be folded and that's a LOT of time spent in one room that you hate the way it looks and operates. Solution? Laundry closet room makeover!!

This is what my laundry room looked like before the makeover. This is how it looked every day since the day we moved in and unpacked. It drove me b-a-n-a-n-a-s every time I was in there doing the laundry. I'd just stare up at the detergents and look over at the 345 (give or take) plastic shopping bags, and I'd have to stand all funny, straddling the vinegar bottles, to put clothes into the washing machine. I started day-dreaming about how I could make it prettier and more organized and more compact - everything in it's place, and if it doesn't have a place at least there is somewhere to hide it until I make a place for it.

I mentioned my desire to makeover the laundry room to Jeff, half expecting him to put the kibosh on it until more pressing home improvements took place, but instead he said okay because we weren't going to have the money for large home improvements this tax return, he thought we might as well do a little something. This project became my little something.

Truth be told, I did the planning, the designing, the hemming and hawing and the eventual pointing at the things I wanted at Lowe's and IKEA - Jeff did all the actual work. He put it all together and made my vision become a reality. Thankfully he liked my vision, because had he veto'ed it I would have been a sad panda.

Without further ado, here is my newly finished laundry room!!  :)

Seriously? I didn't even take the diapers out of the dryer first. And, whoops! You can't see the flower in that photo...

See the doors? It's seriously a little laundry nook. When they're closed you'd never suspect how pretty it is on the inside.

Over the dryer. I plan to throw mismatched children's socks in that basket.

My homemade detergent looks SO MUCH BETTER in that canister, than in the busted Tupperware that I used to keep in it. That basket will catch the loose change I find in Jeff's pockets and inevitable toys I'll soon find in the kids' pockets.

We still plan on putting a rolling tower of shelves or drawers in between the machines, but I haven't found one I like enough yet. Maybe we'll just build one this summer. We want to put a drying bar up for the few things we own that can't be dried in the dryer, but it'll be up at the top, in between the cabinets, out of sight when not in use.

That's my big laundry room reveal! I'm still so excited about it, I smile and take it in every time I open the double doors. It took about a quart and a half of paint (Olympic ONE brand, Yucca color), the tulip photo is from Lowe's and I found it by accident. I was bored and flipping through the framed art while Jeff was looking at something else, but it really pulled together all the ideas/colors I wanted to put into the room. The cabinets, knobs, and detergent canister were from IKEA. The shelves and baskets were also from Lowe's, and the silly framed word print I printed myself, on my home computer, using a free font that I found on Pinterest (Dynasty is the font's name), I put it in an old frame we had in the garage.

This little project packs a big punch of happy and I encourage you to do it if you've been feeling like you need to spruce up an area of your home but don't have a lot of time or money to do it. Laundry rooms, man... who knew?!