Mudroom Makeover {One Room Challenge: Week Three}

And here is a look at the “Before”. Once we moved in.

 And here is a look at the “Before”/once we got our hands on the place.

And here is our current chaos.

I know, I know, I want to cry too.

What our original design board failed to show you in detail is that we need to wrap our entire space in shiplap. I’ll recap the steps we took to complete this task in another post but here are some progress shots of us getting the whole family involved. (In the mean time if you want to see a tutorial we have made in the past about  DIY planking you can read a post from us HERE)

As always, we love to get the whole family involved in putting this house together. Lucky for us, we all like to get our hands dirty.

We also desperately needed more square footage in this space so we decided to investigate and turn our side by side washer and dryer into a stackable version! We ordered a kit and Handy Hubby put them together in an evening. Note: that sounded easy. It wasn’t. In the process of stacking the dryer on top of the washer Hubby had to relocate the electrical so that everything could still plug in and work. This may have included him destroying our storage room in the basement to run wiring. So now our downstairs and mudroom are in total disarray. Please don’t stop by and ask to see the basement. On second thought, I may host a Halloween haunt down there. No decorating required.

Enough with the messy though because we finally nailed down some pretty components to this space and I want to explain them to you all.

Beside our recently stacked washer and dryer we will build an extra tall custom DIY cabinet to house my salon color and supplies. Beside that we will add a custom open concept base where we can house four laundry baskets. Two on the top shelf and two on the bottom. Our space is only large enough to house four baskets, so lucky us, we only have four bedrooms in our home and these baskets can be easily transported from the laundry room to each person’s bedroom. We had originally planned to put a white counter on top of a dark custom built DIY base. The flat counter surface space would give us a spot for folding laundry and mixing color, which meant it would pull double duty! That’s a big win for a small space.

 Since our space is small and needs to double as many hard working spaces. However I also wanted to be realistic.

(Cause guys, once you’ve lived through this kind of mess….you become a realist.)

The reality is that I am a creative and a messy one at that. When I step away from the salon into this space to mix color, I end up leaving color tubes out and don’t always immediately clean up my messes and spills. I know that if we did install a traditional white counter in this place it would be ruined in no time by color and product mishaps. So, after a little deliberation we decided to switch light counters for dark counters and a light base in place of a dark base. This color selection will also help blend the white laundry baskets we will be using underneath the counter in the light base. The counters we will make out of durable pine boards and I will stain them to match the counters and beams we have in our living room.

In the end we will create a visually smooth transition from this space into our main living area by choosing to replicate some of the major design elements we have happening in that space.

So far we have tackled some of the heavy duty elements on our to do list. Ready?

MUDROOM/LAUNDRY ROOM MAKEOVER

Create mood board to display design direction

Create rendering to ensure proper sizing

Source doors and finishing trim (baseboards and crown)

Install doors and finishing trim (baseboards and crown)

Paint door and finishing trim (baseboards and crown)

Source hardware for doors

Install hardware for doors

Source flooring

Install new flooring

Demo the old cabinets

Relocate electrical

Clear space of current color cabinet

Build custom color cabinet

Source system to convert appliances to stackable

Convert washer and dryer to stackable

Add new main lighting

Purchase metal lockers

Refurbish metal lockers

Install metal lockers

Build custom bench with storage

Stain and paint custom bench with storage

Source cabinets and purchase

Install cabinets

Source hardware for cabinets

Install hardware on to cabinets

Source and install a backsplash

Install backsplash

Source light for above sink

Install light above sink

Source open shelving

Install open shelving

Add shiplap to space

Source paint for space

Paint shiplap

Finish dry wall end of wall

If you actually read this in all of it’s entirety, I’m sorry for the little bit of anxiety you are feeling for us right now. You may have noticed we still have tons to do. Yeah, we have noticed that too. (insert nervous laughter here.)

We will be focusing on doing a lot in the next week. Tonight I survived dance class and a hardware store trip with three kids for some paint for the lockers. Hubby spent all evening driving from hardware store to hardware store collecting the supplies we needed. Fingers crossed that the custom cabinet installing and the bench get created this week! Hopefully by next week you will see more of this space come together. Now to figure out when we can squeeze in sleep.

If you are visiting from the One Room Challenge, I hope this doesn’t scare you away. We would love it if you stuck around to see what this space turns into!