Welcome to our next home project, our laundry space.

4 years ago I did an easy and affordable makeover in our laundry space, It was great at the beginning but soon after I realized it wasn’t the best use of the space. So 4 years later, I am making some changes.

Who says open shelves are a great idea in a laundry room? I did and I regretted it shortly after.

One mistake was installing the shelves way too high, I never used the top shelf and it only collected dust and random stuff that was left forgotten for months. I am 5’.1” btw so it was hard to reach the top shelf, why I did this in the first place? I questioned that decision everyday while I was folding clothes on top of my dryer.

The only shelf I used to store our laundry supplies, always looked messy. The original idea was to keep it ‘aesthetic’ by refilling a glass container with the laundry detergent but that only lasted a few months, because who has patience for that!?

This flush mount is timeless, we have it in our hallway and stair landing.

Almost right after finishing this very affordable makeover, I realized we needed closed storage, but I wasn’t sure how exactly we could make the most of this small space, I didn’t want to rush into making changes, I learned from my mistakes and I am glad we waited 4 years to re-do this, the right way.

To give you a better idea, this laundry space is located on the side of our main hallway that connects the entryway to the kitchen. The laundry area is located right next to our guest bathroom, not so ideal when this area -most of the time- had a basket full of lost socks, random stuff and laundry supplies. This picture bellow reflects exactly how this space looked on the daily basis.

When we moved into our home, this laundry space was closed off by two bi-fold closet doors that we ended up removing because I got a too-big washer and dryer, and the closet doors couldn’t function. You can find lots more pictures of how the space looked before and after in this blog post.

The space is small so the plan is to make the most of it. A spot to fold clothes is a must, and with a family of 5 I think that would be so great to have.

For this project, we got 3 sheets of plywood. We planned throughly for this project and wanted to make sure we used almost every cut we could from every sheet of plywood. Also, to make transporting the plywood from the store to our home, we went to the hardware store with our measurements and asked them to cut the plywood lengthwise so it could fit in our SUV. This also made things easier when cutting the plywood at home.

So far, we were able to build a cabinet around the new washer and dryer tower, 2 upper cabinets for lots of storage. You can see more videos on how we built these cabinets here and here.

After removing the board and battens, it was time to bring some charm back to the space. It felt right to continue adding these tongue and v-groove boards to the space since we have these same boards in more than a few rooms in our home; I think it's a subtle detail that adds a lot of character. One thing that I really love about these boards is that they are not perfectly smooth but more perfectly imperfect, which adds to the charm and makes it feel not like a new addition but something that was always there.

Hint hint, I might paint this guest bathroom one of these colors.

This past week was also all about trimming the cabinets we built. This is the satisfying part where you can start seeing the finished product and it gets me excited to see this space all done. We used 1 1/2” wide select pine boards for that cut to size. When we built the cabinets we left just enough space -a gap- on each side to accommodate these boards making the cabinets face look thicker than just the width of the plywood.

For the shelf that will be inside the cabinet, I used edge banding, you just need to use an iron to apply it and you cut the excess after that. So easy and it makes a big difference.

The not-so-fun part was covering hundreds of holes and sanding, lots of sanding.

One of my favorite details so far was repurposing this old plywood we salvaged from when we demoed our kitchen. It was in perfect condition, and I'm glad we saved it for a future project. Now, it's the perfect wood countertop for this laundry space. I still want to stain it, but I will wait a little longer, maybe after painting the cabinets, which is something I am looking forward to doing—picking a paint color… that's next.

So I guess the next time I share this project, it will be a reveal and no longer plain and neutral, which, as a color lover myself, I am SO looking forward to!