I’m convinced that there is nothing more motivating than the “Holy crap, we’ll never make it” deadline. We started the laundry room makeover mid Dec. and HAD to have it done before the baby came (Jan 5.) The great thing about making over such a small space is that 1. It’s small! Projects that would take days in a large space can be done in just a few hours! 2. You can do really awesome stuff without worrying about space overwhelment <—Look mom! New word!
Like I mentioned in the Before post, the space is tiny, really nothing more than a hallway with a bump out for a washer and dryer. But it needed to be better. It needed a pep talk Coach Taylor style. (Tim Riggins I’ll always love you!) And it needed to happen now.
Not so great.
Want to see what it looks like now?
So much better!!
The biggest decision that I had to make was the wall and floor tile. Because it was a small space I wanted something show stopping. After hemming and hawing for all of 2 minutes on homedepot.com I decided on matte black penny rounds for the floors. That was an easy decision, but then came the grout. Grout can massively change the entire appearance of your tile, especially if you are installing something simple with no variation like black penny rounds. Even looking at a bunch of different pictures online didn’t help all that much. (They say its gray but it looks white!?) So I did what any good DIYer would do, I tested it. You can see my 5 options and how they each look over on The Apron.
For the wall tile, I went with this modified white subway tile from Merola. The shape is a little more elongated and slim compared to the traditional size and I loveeeee it! I’ll delve deeper into install in the tutorial post but man isn’t it the stuff dreams are made of?!
I grouted everything with Fusion Pro and it.was.life.changing. If you are embarking on a tile DIY, this is your MVP. It comes premixed (you don’t even have to stir it!) in a rainbow of colors. One thing that throws so many people for a loop when tiling is mixing everything to the right consistency. I know it happens to me! Fusion Pro takes the guess work out. We’ll go into more specifics in the tiling post but this gets 5 gold stars from me!
The countertop was such a simple DIY and I’m loving the waterfall edge! Can you tell we’re still obsessed with stacked plywood over here?
It can be a little hard for me to balance functional + beautiful sometimes but I feel like the cabinet storage is the perfect marriage. It has open shelving for pretty things, and cupboard doors for the not so pretty things that have to live in a laundry room.
The other reality that I had to deal with was cupboard doors. In order to make it so that they didn’t swing open into the walk way and hit the garage door/my head every time I walked by I decided that sliding doors would be so much better.
Simple things like the leather and copper hanging rod rock my world. Its so cute to look at and is completely necessary for a functional laundry room.
Having a countertop to fold things on is a complete game changer. In fact, my laundry couch is getting a little lonesome! Definition: Laundry Couch: The couch in your bedroom that you can never sit on because it holds all of your clean, unfolded laundry.
I cant wait to start sharing the tutorials and things that we learned (the hard way) for this space. But for now, hop over to The Home Depot Blog and check out my tips for picking out grout color and see how 5 different colors look with the black penny tile!
Massive thanks to my bestie The Home Depot for teaming up with me on this project!!
Don’t miss any of the projects in this series! Check the tutorials out below!
