We Made A Laundry Room

So friends, I gotta give some serious props to this husband of mine for building this laundry room. When we first decided to install a bathroom upstairs, he came up with the idea of moving our laundry from downstairs in the kitchen to upstairs off our hallway. I thought he was crazy (just sayin'). I thought it would be more work than it was worth, but he measured it out, analyzed the pipes, created a plan and it totally made sense. And he did most of it himself. He's so cool.

Let's rewind.

This Spring, we started to demo out our guest room to make way for the bathroom and laundry room. This guest room had an existing closet, and once we measured it, we confirmed it was literally the perfect size for our washer and dryer. So framing out this space was actually pretty easy because Josh only had to make minor adjustments. But first, we had to demo out the closet. I started with removing the actual closet organizational units that were in there and then the paneling on the walls. Once I got it down to the plaster, Josh came in to demo out the rest. He also had to remove our entire hallway wall to make way for the opening of the laundry and bathroom areas. It's hard to explain, so here are some photos:

Super remedial drawing of our upstairs layout, so you can kind of get an idea.

We tore down the plaster and lathe to start building entrances to the bathroom and laundry area.

View from the guest room, which is on the other side of the main hallway wall two photos above.
We took a good chunk of this room to install the guest bathroom we've been working on.

The guest room closet that became our laundry room. We just reversed the opening, so now this side is a wall, and the laundry room opens from the main hallway on the other side.

Starting the framing for these two rooms!

View from the guest room.

While I'm certain Josh could have done all the plumbing himself, we hired a contractor to do all the plumbing and electrical for this whole project. That was our next step, and this took about a week for our contractor to do the bathroom, laundry room and living room downstairs. For the laundry room, we had him install a ceiling light and corresponding light switch, and then the appropriate outlets and water things (I don't really know what they are, but he installed them!).

Once that was done, Josh drywalled, taped and sanded, and I primed and painted. We decided to go all white because the bathroom next door will be white and our washer/dryer units are also white. I went with our standby, Simply White by Benjamin Moore (it's my go-to white because it's neutral and easy to work with). How many times can I use the word white in a sentence?

Josh installed the ceiling light, all the switch plates and the flooring next. Even though you can't see the ceiling light, I kind of love it. I picked out a bronze farmhouse-y fixture, and also went with a bronze light switchplate. We chose to go with vinyl floors because of the nature of the room, and on the recommendation of a lot of internet people, and picked out one that had a rustic hardwood look to it with gray tones. It doesn't really matter too much because you can barely even see them (in hindsight, I may have chosen a cheaper, more generic one because literally, I can't even see them. Oh well).

We both also wanted shelving in here for the essentials, so we decided to build a countertop of sorts out of plywood that I stained, and also installed a shelf with metal brackets above it for our laundry detergent and dryer sheets. For some extra decoration, I got this Laundry sign off Etsy from GeorgiaBoardCo, which is pretty self-explanatory.

We plan to do bifold doors to close off the room while not in use, but we haven't gotten that far yet because we need to even out that main wall, and re-drywall it. It'll be so much easier (and nicer looking) to install the doors once we have that whole thing under control. Ideally, we had wanted a sliding barn door system, but sadly, we didn't have enough wall space on either side to make that happen.

Putting a laundry room upstairs was probably one of the best decisions we've made so far. Oh my gosh, it makes things so much easier - the entrance to the laundry area is about five steps from our bedroom entrance - so it couldn't have worked out any better if tried. And it all started with an idea Josh had one day.