Why is my laundry room the dirtiest room in my house? It’s dark and dreary and dusty and damp and I don’t actually know how anything comes out of it looking or feeling clean.
I’ve had makeover plans for it before. I’ve haphazardly strung an extra light up thinking that illuminating the problem will make it go away. I put up some shelves because I needed storage, but the shelves were already in the basement for a reason (that they were recycled Ikea and barely held together and entirely not worthy of being anywhere else in the house). I put down a rug because the concrete floor make my feet too cold, but now it’s dirty and covered in cat hair because I never want to vacuum down there because who the hell vacuums their creepy cold basement laundry room? When we renovated a bathroom last year, I even kept the cupboards we took out with the plans of making them useful in the laundry room. So far they’ve made it to the basement, but haven’t been installed or given a countertop.
Basically every time I’ve tried to make it better, I seem to have made it worse.
I spend a significant amount of time down there. We’re 2 active (read: sweaty) people with 2 furry animals. We create a lot of laundry. All of this is to say that I spend a lot of time in the weirdest, grossest room in my house, all the while being upset about how weird and gross it is, but not actually having the vision to change it for the better.
My workout partner, Becky, recently uprooted her whole life and left her job and went back to school to become a kitchen designer. She graduated with honours and quickly got hired by a new design firm. I’ve seen her work. It’s gorgeous! Becky and I often talk about tearing apart my early 90’s kitchen and making it modern and beautiful, but the current kitchen still works and I really don’t have the cash to take on an upgrade like that.
We also talk about how she’s new to the design industry, and that the shop she works out of is adorable and new and possibly the best new thing on Stittsville Main Street, but that business is building slower than Becky’s overachiever personality is comfortable with.
So, what do a girl with an ugly room and her friend the designer with a little bit of extra time do? Clearly we’re going to makeover the laundry room.
Because here’s what I learned: You can hire a designer to design for you, and once you’ve paid for that design work (aka ‘the plans’), you can make it happen however you want.
She’s going to come over and assess my current situation. She’ll measure and we’ll talk. She’ll see my haphazard shelves and my curtain rod / drying rack, and my stash of mason jars that need a home, and then she’s promised to draw up a beautiful and functional design. I’m going to return my empty beer bottles and look for change under the couch cushions and scrape together a little bit of cash. Then, because Becky is my very good friend, we’re gonna attempt to implement her design with the existing contents of my house along with some help from a local reusit store and we’ll see how close we can get to actualizing her design, and take the dark, gross, and creepy feeling out of my laundry room.
I’ll post pictures and a breakdown of what we spend. I’m too embarrassed to post any serious ‘before’ pictures, because right now it would be more like ‘before she ever cleaned that disgusting room’. Instead, why not check out Becky’s shop, Urban Home Design & Custom Kitchens on Facebook. Or instead you can sit there and imagine spilled laundry detergent on a concrete floor, if that’s more your thing.
I’ve never been so excited to do laundry as I am right now, and we haven’t even started yet.
Bust'er Up 