Category: diy

It’s that time of year again – the Fall One Room Challenge is starting!

There is a room of my house that has been driving me bonkers since we first moved in. It’s a particular pain point in our days and it needs to function MUCH better for our family, especially with winter coming. I am finally ready to address: our laundry room!

Yikes. I didn’t clean up at all for this picture. The top of the dryer is a landing zone for things that need to go out to the garage and the kids shoes are always all over the place. It’s a mess!

It’s probably very obvious by just looking at the pictures, but the biggest pain point is: it is a very small space trying to do way too many things. It’s not even a true room! It’s basically just an oddly-shaped hallway and yet it’s trying to function as a laundry room, mudroom, and storage for things like cleaning supplies, all the food and other necessities for our dogs, and overflow household items like lightbulbs. Unfortunately, there isn’t a more convenient place to store all these items in our house, so I need to find a way to make this space work.

I’ve been putting off addressing the laundry room because it is high on the list of spaces we want to completely remodel. The biggest thing we want to do is eliminate the full bathroom next to it (it’s been used twice in the 2.5 years we’ve lived here) and create a larger laundry room + mudroom that works for our family. We are planning to get a contractor out here soon to talk about the work to be done and start budgeting for that project, but it will likely be late 2022 or 2023 before we are able to tackle it. Even though a gut remodel is on the horizon, I don’t want to spend another year or more in this space without making it more functional. Winter is coming and that means even more boots, shoes, coats, gear, etc – this is the time to make improvements!

I put together a little mood board of what I’m envisioning for the space – even though it’s a temporary fix to hold us over until the remodel, I’m still going to have some fun with it!

I do want to keep a fairly low budget since it’s not a long-term renovation, but there are several things I want to address:

More Organized shoe + coat storage

This was an extra shoe rack we had from a closet in our last home. it’s not really the right size for the space but it’s at least helped keep shoes (somewhat) corralled, although most of the time it looks like this with shoes on the ground. And the kids jackets and bags currently hang on some hooks that the previous owners left behind – they’re perfectly functional but my style. I want to come up with more organized storage that feels more my style.

More Storage

We never use the rod to hang clothes, so I either want to take down the cabinet and add long floating shelves spanning the length of the wall or just remove the rod and have floating shelves between the cabinet and wall. Either way – I need to better utilize that wall above the washer and dryer.

Create Flat Work Space

This one is tricky, but I really need some flat work space for when I need to spray stain remover/scrub stains. With two little ones running around playing all day, nearly every piece of their clothing has some sort of dirt or stain to address before it goes in the washer. The only space I have to do this is on top of the dryer, which isn’t much. I have some ideas for ways to create a small work space and I’m excited to use my creativity on this one!

Better Functioning Closet

The closet in the hallway has very large, deep shelves, but I really feel like this space could be better utilized for maximum storage potential!

And of course – I’m also continuing with my 2021 goal of removing the boob lights from our house and will be replacing the two in this hallway. I’m excited to improve this space in ways that make more sense for our family and our needs! Make sure to follow along on Instagram, where I’ll be sharing more real time updates and a video walk through of the space. You can also follow the other ORC guest participants here.

And if you missed my previous One Room Challenges, you can find all the reveals here:

Spring 2020: Basement Kitchen

Fall 2020: Home Office

Spring 2021: Primary Bedroom

Over the weekend I was able to make major progress with the guest room stenciled wallpaper. I’m currently about 98% done with the first wall and I’m absolutely LOVING the way it looks (minus all the weird lighting shadows – basement bedrooms are so challenging to photograph!)

You’ll notice I have not finished off the very bottom or very top of the wall, and I also have not finished the edge of the wall on the left side of the door. Before I tackle these remaining areas, I need to make an important decision: should I keep this wall as an accent wall or should I continue all the way around the room?

The reason I wanted to do a wallpapered look in here is because the room had been feeling pretty boring with white walls. We needed some color and interest! But is an entire room of this stencil going to feel too busy? Will it feel like the pendulum swung too far the other way?

On the other hand, I’ve always planned on doing the entire room. I especially envisioned the wallpapered look above that board and batten half wall! The other walls, particularly the wall directly opposite the accent wall, feel underwhelming in comparison. There is no cost advantage to stopping now, as I still have plenty of paint and supplies to carry me through the rest of the room. The investment of time isn’t really a factor for me. Yes, it’s a time consuming process, but I truly have not minded and actually find it very therapeutic!

I guess at this point, the big question is: does an entire room of botanical wallpaper feel like overkill? Or will the multiple doors (bedroom door, bathroom door, furnace room door, closet door), board and batten half wall, window, and built in linen closet break up the pattern enough so it doesn’t feel like too much?

Until I decide this question, the project is at a standstill. The easiest way for me to finish off the top and bottom of the wall is to cut the stencil to fit exactly and just move it along down the wall, which I’m not going to do until I finish everything else. Speaking of the bottom – LJ saw me taking photos and wanted to take some of his own. I thought this one turned out quite well and gives a good example of how the wallpaper looks with the overhead light on!

What’s your vote: keep it an accent wall or continue throughout the whole room? Cost and time are not a factor so it’s really a matter of how busy it would or would not make the room feel. I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments!

A few weeks ago, I shared how I wanted to update our guest bedroom by painting a “wallpaper” with stencil. I was pretty optimistic about the scope of the project and hoped to be done by the time our guests came for my birthday weekend (September 11). And now that my birthday weekend is over and our guests have come and gone, all I can say is HAHAHAHAHA to that wishful thinking!

Once I actually started, I realized how big of a project this is. Like, it’s a really big project. Because I’m using five different colors and have some tiny details to paint, it takes me about fifteen minutes to complete one stencil. At this point, I still plan to do the whole room, so this is a long haul project!

It took me a while to work out my techniques for the best results, and the top right corner of the wall is definitely going to need a LOT of touching up before I’m done, but I’m feeling really good about how the latest stencils have turned out and can’t wait to see the whole wall done.

Additional updates coming to the room:

1 – New ceiling light fixture. This room currently has an unattractive boob light (if you know you know,) and it’s one of my 2021 goals to replace all the boob lights in my house. The one tricky thing here is the ceiling tiles, which force the light to be off-center. It’s currently not that noticeable because the light is the same color as the ceiling, and I’m going to strive to find another light fixture that works with out drawing too much attention to the off-centeredness.

2 – Fresh bedding. The wall color palette doesn’t quite match the existing bedding anymore, plus I’d like to update it anyways. When we originally did the guest room renovation, I chose a comforter set with lots of pillows. While this looks nice on the bed, it’s just not a practical choice for guests. They have to remove six pillows just to sleep and then those pillows compete with their luggage for space on the floor or closet. I want to edit the pillows down to just what they need plus maybe one decorative option.

3 – Add a bench? I would really like to try to find a storage bench for the foot of the bed. There’s plenty of space for it and it would create a space to sit to put on shoes or elevate a suitcase, plus double as storage for extra blankets.

4 – Carpet (eventually). This so badly needs to happen, but it’s a big ticket budget item since we will be doing the entire basement at once. I’m really hoping we can replace it within the next year!

Now back to work – I’ve got some stenciling to do!