House Tour: Laundry Closet

Way back when, right when we moved in our house, we tackled our first major project - moving the laundry to a hall closet from the kitchen pantry. We were so new and eager. The plumber came literally the day we moved in and began working. Six months later, the laundry closet was a reality. 

Here's what we started with:

A normal (but very deep and wide) hall closet, located in between two bedrooms and a bathroom. Our plumber at this point had put in our connections and the electrician had wired. 

The next stage looked like this:

The door was widened to accommodate the washer/dryer -ness that was going down. The walls were filled in. 

We then lived with our laundry room like this for a while:

 The new doors were on, the trim had been patched and replaced, shelves added (that were salvaged from the old closet), and the cute front-loaders put in. We painted the closet the same color as the bathroom (Drizzle by Sherwin Williams). 

And yet it wasn't finished - the doors and trim needed staining, I wanted new knobs for the doors, I wanted some solution to the "counter" made out of plywood, and I needed to stock the shelves. Thanks to Eric's visit during his Spring Break, we were able to finally complete the laundry room (and then it took almost a month for it to be clean enough to photograph). And here it is:

My favorite feature of this laundry closet is the "counter". It was made out of extra paneling from den found in the garage that was affixed to a plywood frame. I liked the idea but not the look. I had wanted to put fabric on it but was afraid it would get dirty. Genius Eric came up with the idea to buy sheets of plexiglass and cover the fabric with it. So we got fabric, staple gunned it to the plywood, then cut the plexiglass down to fit:

The other thing I like about the counter (besides the cute green fabric) is that I can lay things out to dry. I have a lot of things I don't put in the dryer and I like to be able to lay them out flat like so:

When I'm doing a room, I like to start from an inspiration or idea. For this space, the polka dotted bins from Target were that inspiration. I saw them on the shelves of Target and knew I had to have them and tried to think of a place to put them. They fit perfectly on the shelves in the laundry room and the blue randomly ended up matching the wall paint. 


So there you have my first project - finally completed!