A Laundry Room With a Twist
When we moved into our house three and a half years ago, it was yellow. Every room in the house was yellow, and a different shade of yellow at that. I like yellow; in fact, I will go so far as to say that yellow is one of my favorite colors. I do not, however, want to live in a box of eternal sunshine. In other words, I began getting bored with the yellow walls. A year after we moved in, Scott came home to a blue office. It’s pretty fantastic, and it’s also my favorite room in the house, though I attribute that as much to the wonderfully comfortable furniture I bought at Pottery Barn as I do to the color on the walls.
A few weeks ago, I decided I had had enough yellow in the laundry room. The lighting in the room mixed with the specific color the previous owners had selected made the whole room appear dingy and dirty all of the time. Also, laundry is my least-favorite chore, so I thought maybe a brighter laundry room would encourage me to deal with our clothes on a more regular basis. Overall, the entire room needed a make-over. I’m talking appliances, walls, cabinets… the whole she-bang. I started with our washing machine and dryer, hoping that whatever I did to them would inspire me to deal with the rest of the room. I was right. While surfing around on the Internet one day, I found Trendy Wall Designs. I fell IN LOVE with some vinyl decals they had and bought them in four different colors. Over the course of a couple of days, I decorated our washer and dryer to look like this:
After completing step one of the laundry room make-over, I knew exactly what I needed to do: I NEEDED to paint my walls lime green. I took one of the green decals to Sherwin-Williams and had them color-match it to a can of paint. As usual, they were spot-on, and I loved the color. I had them tint a gallon of primer, bought a non-returnable gallon of the green paint, and made my way home. I dug up all of my painting supplies from when I painted the office (and my best friend’s bedroom…and my best friend), and got down to business. The guys at Sherwin-Williams said that they could only get the deep green color I wanted to about fifty percent in the primer, and I was okay with that. Once I primed the walls, however, I decided I liked that color BETTER than the color I’d chosen for the walls. I took the primer back to the store and had them color-match the primer to another gallon of paint. If anyone needs a gallon of seriously green (we’re talking Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle green here), I’ve got an extra gallon chillin’ here at the house. I digress. Once I finished the walls, I stepped back and took some pictures. I was seriously in love with my green laundry room.
I knew that I would have to do something with the builder-grade cabinets that hung over the appliances once I painted the walls. They seriously stood out as BAD. Going with the color scheme, I only had a few choices: black, tan, green, blue or white. I decided white would probably stand out the best on the green walls, so I went back to Sherwin-Williams and got a crash-course on painting cabinets (because I’d never done anything like this before in my life). After a bit of experimentation, I ended up with some pretty fabulous cabinets. A trip to Lowe’s later, and I had some even more fabulous hardware to replace the terrible hardware that was already there.
After the cabinet doors dried, I re-hung them and waited for Scotty to get home. Once he arrived, we moved the washer and dryer out of our living room and back into the laundry room. YAY for being able to actually do laundry again….and for not getting odd looks when friends came over and saw our washing machine and dryer hanging out with our couches and coffee table. My project was complete. Here’s the final product:
I am SO happy with how everything came together. It’s so bright and cheerful when I flip on the light in there now, and it actually has made me much happier with doing laundry these days. Next up: stripes in the guest bedroom. Stay tuned…