Laundered

It has been almost a year since I began my journey to update the laundry room and kitchen. Whoa. And I'm still not done! But I'm thisclose when it comes to the laundry room. Check out these progress pics to see how far it's come (you can see the Before {here}):

So much that I love here in this pic. The pedestal that {we built} for our washer and dryer.
The updated hardware on the cabinet doors. A peek at {the curtains I made}. 

View of mainly the same stuff, different angle. I love those bright, colorful curtains. I also love having our brooms/mops hung and having the vacuum cleaner live right there. It didn't really have a very good permanent home prior to updating this room. The doggie door is not new (Chris and his friend Jim installed it back in 2011), but I can't rave enough about the awesomeness of having a doggie door. 

The pocket door to the left goes into our kitchen. The door directly in front (with the chalkboard) goes into our garage. It's our main coming and going door. We hung hooks for bags, purses, brief cases. Some of them I bought new at Lowe's; some of them (like the big ones the brief cases are hanging on) were old planter hangers I found in our garage from the previous owners. They have been really helpful in keeping the room organized. 

A better view of the broom hanging station/cleaning supply shelf. You can also see just a few of the many hats that Chris has. We really needed that coat and hat hanger! Chris's friend from work, Hammer, made us the cowboy boot key holder. The green bar on the wall was an old towel bar that I found under the cabinets above the washer. It had been there from the previous owners. I removed it, cleaned it up, and spray painted it that green that I'm loving right now ({Valspar Apple Gloss}). Little baskets hang from it on S-hooks and keep extra sunglasses, cell phone arm bands, and gloves in the winter. 

I guess I maybe should have staged this better and taken most of this stuff off so that it was only sparsely filled, but I really wanted this reveal to be realistic. This is what we're using this stuff for! 

Oh, the command center. I love it. I talk more about creating it {here}, so I'll just point out that the fabric background matches the curtains, then reiterate how much I love it. And how cool dry erase crayons are.

The drying bar! How did we live without it before??? That alien-looking blue thing is the {Pressa drying rack} from Ikea. It's kind of awkward, but it's really nice for indoor drying of socks, tee shirts, etc. The space below the hanging bar is still waiting to be properly finished. I want to put some kind of clothes-folding table there. 

I really, really like this chalkboard. We had a ceiling light in our kitchen when we moved in; the leafy metal thing (at the time, it was finished in oil-rubbed bronze) was the decorative frame around the light fixture. Well, the fixture flat out died, no bringing it back from the dead. So we removed it and replaced it with a ceiling fan (I don't care what blog people say, when you live in the South, ceiling fans are the best!). But I knew this beautiful frame could be re-purposed  so I kept for a couple of years. Lo and behold, I decided I wanted a chalkboard on the door and this was the perfect frame. I spray painted it with Valspar Apple Gloss. The chalk board it just a circle of {Valspar chalkboard paint} applied directly to the door (three coats). 

I got these little mesh baskets at Tuesday Morning and the wooden letters at Hobby Lobby
(spray painted with {Rustoleum Painter's Touch Ultra Cover in Satin Lagoon}). 

This is an {extra-large open-top L.L. Bean Boat and Tote bag} that I got years ago (the color is Marigold, but they don't appear to offer it anymore). We keep all of our clothes that need to be dry-cleaned in here. And they pretty much never leave because we rarely take things to be dry-cleaned. But the bag is pretty!

So.....here is a run-down of what we did to the laundry room:

• Added planking to top half of wall
• Trimmed out planking (with some family help)
• Added chair rail (with some family help)
• Painted planking, cabinets, and ceiling
• Painted drywall
• Painted trim
• Added new hardware
• Lined shelves
• Built washer dryer pedestal
• Built cleaning supply shelf/broom rack
• Added hat rack
• Added purse/bag hooks
• Created chalkboard on door
• Created command station
• Added baskets to hold everyday stuff
• Added drying/hanging rod
• Made and hung curtains

And here's what we still have to do:

• Fix cabinet clasps in a couple of cabinets
• Touch up some cabinet paint
• Clean up white paint lines around window mullions
• Build clothes folding shelf
• Prettify dog food container
• Spackle and paint mistake holes
• Get pretty rug
• Get pretty light fixture
• Bring light switch panels out so they're flush with walls (now that paneling has made walls thicker)
• Organize medicine et al in cabinets

And maybe eventually we'll:

• Build better/prettier cleaning supply shelf (something more like {this})
• Maybe re-paint walls a crisp white (??)
• Update doors on cabinets to something more architecturally interesting and newer/cleaner

So that's where we're at right now. Progress. Major progress. And our first real DIY project. It pretty much taught me that Chris is good at building stuff, but doesn't really enjoy it. And this is supposed to be fun, not a chore for him. So I'm trying to do projects that I can mainly complete on my own so he can use his very limited free time to do stuff that is fun and relaxing for him. But I'm so glad that we've learned that pretty early on and didn't rip out our kitchen or something. Learning on a relatively tiny project like the laundry room has been just fine!

Major Kitchen Organization Overhaul Update 7: Paneling is All Up!

The walls of my laundry room are covered in horizontal paneling!!! 

Big Tex and I finished putting up the panels this afternoon. In total, it took six packages of EverTrue Plank Paneling. At $10.97 a package, that's a pretty darn cheap wall treatment! Thanks to Karen at the The Quaint Cottage for leading me to these super affordable and easy-to-work-with panels. 

The project is far from done. The panels still need to be trimmed out, caulked, primed, and painted, but this is still a huge step. It feels like a major milestone and I'm super psyched :-)

Getting My Brain Straight: What I Want Out of the Laundry Room

The laundry room project is on like donkey kong; I am conquering my fear and tackling it! As I was determining the levelness of the walls and marking out lines in 4-inch increments, I realized I needed one last soul-searching, inspiration list for exactly what I want out of this laundry room. Once the paneling and painting are done, I need to get going on the details that will make this room worth all the work that is going into it!

What do we use it for?

• Laundry (duh)
• Our washer and dryer
• Ironing board
• Laundry baskets
• Laundry soaps, etc.
• Clothes that need to hang dry
• Cleaning products
• Household product storage
• Light bulbs
• Paper towels
• Batteries
• Extra Soap
• Recycling
• Plastic
• Paper
• Aluminum
• Plastic bags
• Dog stuff
• Dog food container
• Dog bowls
• Miscellaneous dog accouterments
• Informal entryway (it opens to the garage, which is where we always come into and leave the house)
• Keys
• Sunglasses
• Spare change
• Purse/Bags
• Coats (in the winter)
• Shoes (I shouldn't keep my shoes here, but sometimes I just can't help kicking them off as soon as I walk in...)

This is not a large room we're talking about. We're lucky in that it's not a tiny closet, but it's pretty small and it wears a lot of hats. So I really want to maximize space and  squeeze every last inch out of the room. Oh, and I want it to be pretty. :-)

Here are some inspirational ways to deal with the above requirements: 

Ana White Homemaker

This takes care of both the washer/dryer issue and the laundry baskets. Bam!

Trends and Traditions

I love the idea of using an old dresser and turning the top into an ironing board. I'd have to find one that fit in the space next to our dryer pretty snugly, or think of a really good way to use the gap space. 

Piccsy

If we go with the ironing dresser route, I'd like to do something like this with the bottom drawer (but with three food bowls, instead of one food and one water bowl). 

Martha Stewart

Super easy solution for clothes that can't go in the dryer. I'll hang this below the small, high cabinets above the ironing board space (see current pics here). 

Martha Stewart

I don't really want to make this recycling center in the laundry room, but I think it would be perfect right outside the door on the garage wall. 

Martha Stewart

Love this simple idea for organizing coats and accessories. Smaller baskets would be great for sunglasses and other smallish things like hats, mittens, and purses. 

Martha Stewart

What about an ironing table instead of an ironing dresser? I'd be giving up storage space in the drawers, but I love the shoe tray underneath the table. Hmmm...


Gotta get the paneling and painting done, then I can get to this fun stuff! Ok, I'm going, I'm going...

Salvation Makeover: Magnetic Makeup Drawer-Shelf

I took a break from kitchen organization this weekend and actually finished a project! And it was one that I can really use, because my bathroom is out-of-control messy. It's a little better now though! ;-)

Using an old drawer that I got at the Habitat ReStore, I created a magnetic makeup shelf for corralling all my makeup and keeping it accessible to me. I wore eyeshadow that's not taupe to work today because I was able to get my hands on my other colors! Read on for the details and how to.

A couple months ago, my friend Erica (check out her blog here!) and I went to the Habitat ReStore on our lunch break, and Erica had one of her brilliant ideas: take one of their million old, mismatched drawers and make it into a shelf! I immediately fell in love with the idea and decided to take it one step further. I had seen this framed magnetic makeup board on Pinterest and wanted to incorporate that concept into my drawer-shelf. 

I scrubbed it down and removed the probably 30-year old contact paper lining the bottom. Then, using my handy-dandy birthday sander, I got to work sanding and smoothing.

I filled in the holes where the pulls had been, then re-sanded after the spackle was dry. 

I asked Big Tex to remove the little lip that hung over the bottom (now back) of the drawer. That way it would lay flush against the wall once I hung it up. 

I sprayed it with three coats of Valspar Premium Spray Paint (I think the color is called Exotic Sea). I sanded lightly between coats. Then I sprayed it with a coat of clear acrylic sealer. 

I cut out a piece of this cute fabric I got on sale at Hobby Lobby and Mod Podged it to the bottom of the drawer-shelf. Then I totally dropped the ball on my photo documentation and forgot to take pictures of the metal I put on the inside back of the shelf. It was decorative sheet metal that I got at Hobby Lobby. It was really easy to work with (I was able to trim it with scissors, but I would use tin snips if I did it again because it was hard on my hands to cut it with scissors). I hot-glued the metal onto the back of the shelf but, as usual for me, the hot glue didn't really work, so I had to rely on the screws that I used to hold the shelf on the wall to also keep my metal on (no biggie really, the screws had to be there anyway!). 

Ta-Da! My finished makeup shelf! I got a roll of trimable, adhesive magnet to put on the back of my makeup, but supplemented the adhesive with super glue because the adhesive backing on the magnet is not very strong. But now those little magnets aren't coming off my makeup and it's living happily on the shelf!

I also Mod Podged some scrapbook paper onto two little tin cans (I've become a hoarder of tin cans and it finally paid off!), and put my makeup brushes, lipsticks, etc. in them. And there's plenty of room on the inner and top shelf for my perfumes and pretty smelling lotions and sprays! 

I love my new makeup shelf! What do you think?

Salvation Makeover: Goodwill Lamp

Treasure hunting at Goodwill is one of my new favorite Saturday rituals. A few weeks ago, I found this lamp and shade combo that were functionally perfect, but kind of blah to look at.

I bought some gray spray paint and painted the base. Then my friend Heather helped me make a shade template and cut out a piece of fabric using that template. I don't have good photos for the process right now, but I plan to make another lampshade and I promise I will document the process better and post it on the blog.  I was a little nervous about getting the whole thing right and didn't think to take photos! Anyway, this is the semi-finished product:

Why only semi-finished, you ask? Well, I'll show you why:

Arghhhhh! I left too much fabric folded under and it showed through when the lamp was on. It bothered me to no end, but I had that feeling when you finish a first-time project that's taken a long time: I just want to be done with it! So I didn't do anything to fix it right away. But it bugged me so much that I never turned the lamp on; I just let it sit on the table like it was a knick-knack with no function. And I'm not too much of a knick-knack girl. So this morning I decided to make the fix. I ran hot glue around the very inside of the roll that goes along the inside of the shade, then secured the fabric to the glue. When it was stuck really well, I went along the entire shade and trimmed down all of the excess. The result?

SO MUCH BETTER! Now I can actually leave the lamp on. I thought this was a good example of a DIY project that turns out kind of disappointing at first, but is completely fixable. 

Approximate Project Cost

Lamp: $7 at Goodwill

Shade: $3 at Goodwill

Spray Paint: $4 at Home Depot

Fabric: $5.50 at Hobby Lobby (with 30% fabric sale that week)

Total: $19.50, plus the cost of other stuff I already had (hot glue, wrapping paper, etc.)

What do you think of the makeover? After is quite a bit prettier than Before, isn't it? ;-)