One Room Challenge Week 1 – Laundry Room Plans

I’m so excited to finally be participating in a One Room Challenge!!!! I’ve followed along for many years, excited week-to-week to see the progress of the featured designers, along with any of the guest participants that had caught my eye. And now, I’m one of those guest participants!!

Truth be told, this challenge is serving as the motivation not only for me to complete our dark and dingy basement laundry room, but also for starting this blog in general. I really love designing the spaces in our home, and have been wanting to start a blog to document out progress for a while, but the ORC really gave me the push to do it, so I’m thankful for that.

Now, back to the task at hand, the “before” space. So the before is bad, like real bad. We live in a 1940’s Dutch Colonial, and the basement area was, and still will be, serving as one of the few good storage areas in the house. As you can see in the photo below, there are good and efficient ways to store things…and then there is this!!

Just past the storage area shown above (where apparently we also keep the beers, goodness we’re classy…), is the washer and dryer space. I don’t know if you can tell in the photo, but the washing machine was set up with a drain directly into the sink, and we had it held in place with a scrub brush. This I wouldn’t recommend. It did come loose on one occasion and sprayed soapy clothes water all over the floor. So needless to say, plumbing is being addressed so that the washer will be supplied and drain directly into the wall, versus relying on a utility sink for those functions.

In advance of this challenge, Aaron and I demoed the entire space (Dumpster in a Bag for the win!!), and got it all cleared of appliances so that we could basically have the space “white-boxed” prior to the ORC.

We hired out the initial electrical, HVAC, framing, drywall and plumbing work. Since this is our first non-cosmetic renovation, I knew there was a strong possibility we wouldn’t be able to anticipate all the challenges we might face, and six weeks would fly by with only walls put up and nothing pretty to show for it.

The photo below is Exhibit A of the above mentioned unforeseen “challenges”. It turns out the cast iron pipes in our foundation — where basically all of the plumbing in our house ran through to exit towards the sewer — had deteriorated and were essentially just draining into the dirt beneath our house. I’m not exactly an expert on home renovations, but I’m pretty sure that’s the kind of thing that can derail one’s chances of completing the One Room Challenge, haha!!

So here is where we stand now, well, with our existing washer and dryer back in place.. And believe it or not, its been like this for a couple of months, so to say that we need the ORC for motivation is a bit of an understatement. And although it has been a little frustrating to not be making progress on the space, it is still infinitely better in this state than how it was previously. It is also amazing how much lighter and brighter the space is now, even though we’ve added no windows (and the windows that are there are pretty small). It feels like light is just flooding the space–which yes, I choose to illustrate with a picture taken a night, hopefully my planning skills can see some good improvement as this challenge progresses as well.

I almost feel bad making you scroll through all of those “before” pictures before showing you the pretty stuff. But I feel like you really need to take it in and experience the true sense of how bad it was before, to really appreciate where we’ll (hopefully, fingers crossed!) end up in six weeks.

So the first inspiration photo below is one that I am really drawn too. I really like the combo of warm wood shelves and brass, mixed with soft pretty colors. And of course you gotta love a patterned floor tile.

And I love this bright and cheery space from Caitlin Wilson–the wallpaper is just gorgeous with the pink cabinets. I searched high and low for a pink and blue wallpaper that would work with the Ikea cabinets and tile that we purchased, and finding just the right tone proved to be very challenging. Wallpaper and rugs seem to be one of those things, where it is really hard to gauge the true color until you see it in person. Thank goodness for websites that let you order samples!!

The wallpaper I did choose is below, from Hygge & West, and the sample I got looks a bit more blush in person. The rug is from Rejuvenation, and is also brighter and less rusty looking in person. So I’m hoping once this is all actually in the space, it coordinates well and mostly keeps the light bright feeling there is now with “builder white” on the walls, floor and ceiling.

So these next few weeks are going to be filled with plenty of tiling, cabinet assembling and wallpapering (all things we’ve never done before, eek!!!) — followed by a bunch of accessorizing and finalizing of plans. We have a couple of wild cards currently because there is some duct work we need to hide, and a drain clean-out that needs to be concealed but accessible. So we’re going to have to get creative, but I’ve got a couple of ideas how we might do it. Stay tuned and I’ll update the blog next week with the progress we’ve made, and keep more regular updates coming on Instagram.

And of course, don’t forget to check out the featured designers, and all the other guest participants over at the ORC Blog.