Laundry Room/Mudroom Makeover

We're a lot like If you Give a Mouse A Cookie around here when it comes to our home projects. One thing leads to another, leads to another and before you know it (or over a long period of time...) much more than was originally planned has happened. That was sort of what happened with this project. You see, our laundry room was more of a laundry closet & was situated right at the rear (and most frequently used!) entrance to our house. Right next to our laundry closet was a closet containing our furnace and finally after that was a door that led into the hallway...so there were LOTS of doors to work around. Pictured below is from our hallway-- the door to the right led into our hallway, the folding doors are the laundry doors, the gap to the left was where there was a furnace door & the white door in the back is our back door.

While working around the multiple doors was annoying, it was livable, and the doors housed things that we needed (our furnace & washer/dryer). And actually, thank goodness for those laundry doors or you would have seen an ugly furnace or THIS when walking through our home...

The orientation of the washer/dryer always drove me crazy as well, because the washer was on the right and turned perpendicular on the left. The shelves were frustrating because I couldn't reach anything (and thus, was always climbing on the appliances to reach things on the top shelf). Additionally, anytime I was doing laundry and the doors were open, you couldn't enter or exit our house without them getting in the way. But again, these were all just annoying things...

Once, a long time ago, we were chatting about our furnace and how stupid it was that it was on our main floor when we have a huge unfinished basement that it could take up a little section of. We decided years ago that when/if our furnace ever died we would put the new one down in the basement and gut the entire space to make more room. After all it was impractical and ugly!! This is looking at the space from inside the back door-- it was basically a small hallway with lots of annoying doors!

Well last November the furnace finally died & the project began! We had been saving & planning for this for awhile so appliance shopping was in order (Yay!) Aaron's dad helped Aaron rip out the old furnace. Aaron and I worked hard a removing walls/doors/studs etc. We got rid of our old washer/dryer, put in new tile to match the bathrooms we re-did, put up new drywall, patched, painted, etc. We chose a light teal color (that isn't displaying exactly true to color in the pics). It's brighter than any other walls in our house, but we love it and it reminds me clear ocean water. We wanted to start the long, tedious, never-ending *wonderful* process of painting the rest of our oak trim on the main level to match what we re-did upstairs, so we figured we'd start with this room. We were able to have our new furnace installed in the basement with a return air exchange needed up in the new room, but we ended up using that extra space to our advantage and added a counter top in. We are thrilled with the results and while the bones have been mostly done for a few months now, we finally finished up the details. Here's what it looks like now!

Looking into the room from the back door

Again looking in from the door--We removed the door that takes you
into the hallway and put a gate up for now. Where there aren't toddlers
in the house the gate will be gone too!

The white box hides our furnace exchange
and doubles as a nice counter to throw mail,
lay out things for errands, etc. The bench
houses shoes for the fam. I covered it with
some brown/white fabric instead of using the
tan cover it came with.

The large white storage unit houses coats,
our vacuum and then storage, etc on shelves. Our laundry
bins fit nicely on top of this shelf, and I can still reach them. I
always "challenge myself" to keep the bins empty up there
because that means the laundry is DONE & AWAY! Ah :)

Here is the room looking out from the hallway. You
can't exactly see but another nice thing my hand husband
did was install a new back door & a retractable screen door.
We like both but we LOVE the screen door-- lets in so much
light & fresh air!

There used to be an ugly oak box hiding
the electrical box. I covered the box with batting
and fabric instead and made this to hang
pictures, cards, etc. 

Bible verse on the wall across from the bench & shelf

The shelf & baskets was another amazon find.
We chose deep plum baskets to offset the bright teal.
    And they are handy for keeping hats, gloves, sunscreen,
      etc organized and away! The hooks rarely ever have jackets
       on them, but now there's a space for friends to put their coats!

Another look from the hallway-- so much
more space now! The bench comes in handy
for putting shoes on and off. 

And that's that! Another room done in our house....We should be moving onto the kitchen/sun room makeover which is the only space in our house we haven't renovated yet. But we never do what we SHOULD do....so instead we're making over our master bedroom. Not much changing there but paint & furniture, but VERY excited about the changes to come in there! Stay tuned (ha, in like a year apparently!!) That's what happens when you are working on house projects with little kids! :)