My vision for this room has been in my mind since the day we moved in… well, maybe not the day we moved in but at least in the first few months.
When we first moved in, our laundry room was the stereotypical cookie cutter laundry room that you would find in just about any neighborhood in America. Except, the metal shelving was hanging on by a thread, so we knew it had to go. So, we were left with a spacious laundry room with no shelves or storage areas.
We decided that the room needed several places for storage, so we set out to create floating shelves on the wall with the washer and dryer. On the opposite side, my husband planned to build an insert that would serve as the mudroom part of our laundry room.
We decided to shiplap the wall that held the washer & dryer to give it an accent it needed. This proved to be the most difficult part of the entire renovation because we quickly realized every part of our wall was uneven.
After clearing out the laundry room, we decided to tackle the shiplap first. For the shiplap we bought a 1/4 inch 8 X 4 sheet of plywood from Home Depot and cut it into strips about 5 3/16 inch wide and the length was determined by the wall. The thinner wood helped us achieve this look without having to spend tons of money. Once the wood strips were cut, we taped off various areas that held studs using blue painters tape on the ceilings. This made our job much easier once we got started.
Like I mentioned earlier, the tricky part was that our wall was extremely uneven, so we had to measure and adjust each strip to match our wall. To apply the wood strips, we used wood glue and then nailed the boards to the wall using a nail gun. For spacing, we used two or three nickels to perfectly keep the boards spaced while adhering them to the wall.
Next, we used wood putty to patch the nail gun holes before painting. After sanding down the putty, we began to paint. We were only going to paint the shiplapped wall white, but I fell in love with the color and decided the whole room needed to be white. We went with Behr Pure White Primer + Paint which you can find at Home Depot. The wall took about two solid coats to achieve the look we wanted.
After we finished painting, we stained two 2 X 12 boards for the shelves. The stain used on the boards was Dark Walnut by Varathane. We also bought four 12 in. long 1 in. pipes, 1 in. flanges, and 1 in. caps from Home Depot, which we used to hang the floating shelves.
For the insert, my husband built the insert based off of some other inserts I found on the internet. The entire structure is made from the following:
- 2 – 8 X 4 3/4 inch plywood
- 1 – 2 X 12 board
- 1 – 2 X 4 board (corbels)
- 3 – 1 X 4 X 8 (shiplap)
- 3 – 1 X 2 X 8 (finishing molding)
- Scrap plywood into 1 1/2 in. strips to add the framing border on the sides of the bottom.
You can see the entire process of painting and staining the insert here. We painted the entire insert using the same Behr Pure White paint as the rest of the laundry room. We also stained the seat Dark Walnut by Varathane.
Lastly, we removed the original door to the laundry room and installed a sliding room to give us even more room for storage. We found an old antique door that someone was throwing away and repurposed it for this door. The paint color is Whipped Mint by Behr, and we used a hanging door kit from Amazon.
Like any DIY project, it certainly took as longer than expected, but the end results were well worth it. We now have a place where we have several storage options that I actually somewhat enjoy doing laundry in.
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