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Laundry Room Progress: Paint and Cabinets!

April 13, 2015

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So much has happened in the laundry room the last few weeks, I’m excited to give you an overdue update. Last time I shared the renovation progress with you on the blog (Sidenote: I have started sharing quick project updates on instagram when I don’t have too much time to blog–which has been frequently, lately. Do follow me there @chrislovesjulia!), we had just removed the walls to our former 4th bathroom and moved the washer hookups over here, vented the dryer out the roof and patched the floors.

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Since then, we have drywalled and patched everything (although the center ceiling line where the wall used to be still needs some work), added recessed lighting, painted the walls, trim and door, and installed 3 of 4 cabinets!

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Let’s break it down a little bit, starting with paint. Once we had the drywall up and the walls patched–which was a doozy!–I went to town picking a paint color. This room, along with the master bath and Greta’s bathroom, are the only rooms in the house without a giant window flooding the space with light–it doesn’t help that I took these photos at night–but I really wanted to choose a light color for that purpose. Initially, we thought to just paint the laundry room the same color as the adjoining great room–Ben Moore’s Hazy SkiesBut, a test spot proved it was much too dark. It’s the darkest green-y looking color in the photo below–not at all what it looks like in the great room–but, still a great lesson in showing that paint colors appear different in every space. It was clear Hazy Skies was not for the laundry room.

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I also tested out Clark+Kensington’s Richland  (the lighter green-y swatch) but I just felt meh about it. I started picturing the room as a whole and realized, there would be very little wall space showing. Plus, we have a stainless washer and dryer coming, beautiful wood countertops, a punchy rug in place–a warm white paint seemed like the way to go so some of the bigger elements could shine.  I actually chose the same white I color-matched to Ikea’s Bodbyn cabinets–Valspar’s Soft Wool in an eggshell finish for the walls and semi-gloss for the trim.

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While I painted the walls, Chris painted the yellowed door with our paint sprayer (our one true love!) leading to the garage Ben Moore’s Onyx in a satin finish–you may have caught that mesmerizing video on Instagram. What a difference that made! It looks like a brand new door and added a little drama to the room. I kind of think every room needs a little, or a lot, of black. We replaced the old doorknob with a simple black one to finish off the look.

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As for the cabinets, we are using Ikea’s new Sektion line and are so far, very impressed! We put the upper three cabinets together in 30 minutes–and hung them in another 20. We have one 15″ wide base cabinet to install once our washer and dryer get here.

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The only bummer is we misplaced (or didn’t receive??) a set of cabinet door hinges–gah!! So, use your imagination for a minute on the right side. ;)

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We opted for 40″ tall cabinets with 30″ cabinet doors so there’s an open shelf along the bottom for quick grab things like dog treats and dryer sheets. Once we add the crown molding and trim out the sides, it will be seamless to the walls and ceiling.

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There’s always someone who asks if we can really reach up there. Yes. ;)

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Since we are due to get the center lights for the ceiling today (!!), I’ll hold off chatting about the recessed lights until we have those installed–I’ll be back with that update later this week. Can you believe this same angle used to look like this?

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I might just end every laundry room update with that picture–it’s just the most exciting thing to see this vision come to fruition.

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What do you think?

  1. Susan says:

    Hello,

    I love your laundry room redo. How deep are the cabinets? How much distance is from the front of the washer to the cabinets? Do you have any difficulty reaching things in the cabinet? The reason I ask is that I have my washer and dryer on pedestals so they are up higher. I also have a sink at one end. I want to install 12 inch deep cabinets but I want to be able to reach things. The way that the room is set up is that the cabinets will go over the sink as well. Any ideas on how to make this work?

  2. Kirkley says:

    Are all the doors on the cabinets the same size? The outside cabinets look larger. We’re updating our laundry room and trying to decide how it would look if the doors aren’t all the same size.

    • Julia says:

      They are two different sizes. The space on that wall was 72 inches, so we used 2 18″ cabinets and 2 30″ cabinets. In our sketch up we had the 18s next to each other and the 15s next to each other, but we decided to make it symmetrical in the end and I think it works!

  3. Jaimee says:

    would you recommend these cabinets for the fauxdenza!? I’m looking to make one and they discontinued the line that you used!! ahh!

  4. emily says:

    love a good before and after! and, i love the soft white wall color…so clean in a laundry room!

  5. Ann says:

    Thank you and how kind of you to answer my question. Ahhhh, I see where you’re coming from re: the ceiling. I forgot about the kitchen changes needed in there and waiting to finesse it then. When you mentioned you have to re-texture the entire ceiling, wouldn’t of it been easier to remove the texture that’s already there before putting up the cabinets and finishing the walls to have less objects to clean and work around? Your experience with this may come in handy for us because we have a small ceiling area we need to tackle. :)

  6. Ann says:

    I have been so excited for all this you have no idea. Silly question but a person can never learn unless you ask. Is there a reason why y’all didn’t finish sanding the ceiling or do you plan on planking it? (I noticed the tape/mud patch by the rock seam line area) You’re probably so good at containing dust y’all don’t need to worry : ) Uhhum. Unlike us over here-ha!

    • Julia says:

      Good question! What you don’t see in most of these pictures is that there’s more boards that need to come down from the ceiling where an old closet was. You can kind of see it in the first photo. We’ll be tackling that as soon as we can move back the wall in the kitchen and frame out the new floor to ceiling lockers for the other side of the laundry room. We were told with textured ceilings, especially texture like ours that is pretty random, it is extremely difficult to match–so we’ll have to retexture the entire thing. Which didn’t make sense to do until we were completely done moving walls. To be honest, I am pushing to plank it, but we’ll see!

  7. Liz says:

    How did you fix your floors once you removed that wall? Did you have to remove a lot of the tile and tile it again?

    • Julia says:

      Once we removed the wall, we had to pry up the tile from the former wall to the back wall and re-lay and add more tile. It actually only took a couple hours.

  8. Meagan Briggs says:

    I can’t even believe how much this room has transformed, and it is still in the beginning stages! Well done, guys!

  9. daynes says:

    We’re just finishing up our ikea cabinets and are a little stuck on the best way to trim out the sides. I’m interested in how y’all are planning to do that.

  10. Vanessa says:

    We’re working on our laundry room right now as well. I’m a big fan of color but we’ll be using Sherwin Williams Cashmere paint in Extra White to brighten the small space and *hopefully* help it feel extra crisp and clean :)
    Question about the drywall – is there a reason you hung the cabinets before skimcoating that wall and priming it?

  11. Melanie says:

    I love the cabinets! In the first picture I actually thought that it was meant to just be shelving and liked it! I especially love the bottom row of shelves! Clever!

  12. It’s really coming along! Smart idea to go with white walls if not much will be showing – I think that will help the room feel brighter. I’ve been watching the progress on Instagram – totally understand the difficulty sometimes with updating the blog, I’m running into that too lately with ours!

  13. Evelina says:

    I love what you’re doing with the cabinets! I would never in a million years think to get shorter doors to have a shelf exposed. Simply brilliant.

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