The laundry room is complete. It nearly killed us, but after two weeks, an unthinkable number of late nights, an ice storm, a power outage, a stomach bug, and the final push of nearly 46 hours straight, we were able to pull it off just in time for Christmas.

The plan was to capture the whole reveal on video HGTV style to be able to share the look on my parents’ faces. But as it turned out, the reveal happened at 6am on Christmas morning, my mom was still in her nightgown, Kes had already passed out from sheer exhaustion & I hadn’t slept for 2 days. Needless to say we weren’t exactly camera ready. It was a lot of work. No doubt about that. But to be able to give my parents a beautiful, functional laundry room and to see how happy they are with their new space, made it all worth it. We’re pretty excited to be able to finally reveal it with the world – and here it is…

Before & After

The Details

If you remember where we started we had some pretty specific issues to solve. We started with the dryer. Knowing that we wanted to put in a counter top to solve the lack of a work surface, the existing dryer with it’s top controls just wouldn’t do. So we took to kijiji and were able to find a suitable dryer at a great price! From there we hit up our local Home Depot and found an awesome all in one, utility sink, cabinet & faucet.

To solve the issue of storage, we used floating shelves to create open storage along the back wall. We had originally purchased the shelves for our first home but never ended up using them. For further shoe & miscellaneous storage, we were able to score perfect condition IKEA Billy Bookcases on kijiji as well at less than half the price of buying them new. To give the Billys a bit of a twist we customized them, by attaching the 2 shelves together and then wrapping them in pine boards which we then white washed using PARA White Collar (P5248-14). Because we were working with a narrow space, we decided to mount the Billys up off the floor to keep the space from feeling closed in. We then added couple of drying racks for added hanging storage.

We painted the whole space in PARA On the Tarmac (P5202-34) to give it a cool, calming feeling and I absolutely love how this colour turned out. We were gifted some awesome paint supplies from HomeRight which made easy work of it. The QuickPainter Pad Edge Painter & PaintStick EZ-Twist Roller were awesome to work with. Not only did they eliminate the need for a roller pan, but it probably cut our paint time down to about about a quarter of what it would have taken using a traditional roller! The only drawback to the PaintStick is that it’s a stick. Which for us made working in the narrow entry for the laundry room a bit of a challenge. Working in a larger room though, would have been no problem.

For the entry we used horizontal stripes to create a feature wall. We then mounted white washed pine boards along one of the stripes to provide added structure for storage hooks, as well as to tie in the white washed Billy on the other side.

The 12×24 porcelain tiles were a key find at the ReStore. The colour ties in beautifully & at $1.25/sq ft, they can’t be beat! The glass mosaik tile used for the top border we picked up on sale at Lowes. I love how the mosaik picks up the greys in the big tile & also pulls in the blues from the wall. This project was my first attempt at tiling and I’m pretty happy with how it turned out. I think there will definitely be some more tiling in my future.

We had a lot of fun getting this project completed. We challenged ourselves. We learned a lot and we got a ton of practice for the many DIY projects we have ahead of us at the Dreamhouse.

UPDATE: We’ve entered Creating with the Stars this year! Make sure to check out the East Coast Creative Blog and click on our ‘Fun & Functional Laundry Room Refresh’ submission to vote for us!

And now it’s time for you to get in on the action….

The GIVEAWAY

With the New Year just hours away, we know many of you have got your DIY project lists ready to go. So along with our friends at PARA Paints & HomeRight, we thought we’d help get you started. What’s up for grabs? A gallon of PARA Paint (tinted in the PARA colour of your choice), a HomeRight PaintStick EZ-Twist Roller and a HomeRight QuickPainter Pad Edge Painter to help make the painting process easier. Wondering how you enter? Use the clever little widget below to enter in several different ways. The more stuff you do, the more entries you get. You can leave a comment telling us about your upcoming DIY project for a couple of entries, or you can like The Dreamhouse Project on Facebook and follow us on Twitter for a few more entries. Or you can like & follow our awesome sponsors for even more entries. Simple enough right? Well…what are you waiting for???

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