"Washing Away The Ugly"

So you've seen the kitchen. Lets move on to the laundry room. First of all, let me tell you how much I love our laundry room. The house I grew up in had a small laundry closet in our hallway. You know the type I'm talking about...slider doors and all. Practical but not efficient. When we began house hunting, one of the things I knew that I wanted was larger laundry room. Now don't misunderstand me and think that I actually do laundry...I HATE DOING LAUNDRY!!!! I thought, however, that if I had a beautiful space to do this loathsome chore in it would make it more fun. I also wanted a space for our cat (at the time we only had the one). I was done stepping on pieces of cat food and stray bits of litter in the bathroom and I refused to put a litter box in the kitchen. So, when our realtor showed us our soon to be first home I fell in love with the spacious laundry room. It had room for everything! Sadly though, it was not the beautiful space that I had envisioned in my mind. It took me about a year of looking at it before I did anything about it. My husband came home one afternoon to find me frantically pulling the border off the walls. At this point, we had to do something...ugly "antique wash board" wallpaper border was nothing compared to the border scraps and wallpaper glue that remained.



I decided to keep the room light and airy. We love blues, whites, tans, browns so we went with blue and white. I knew I wanted to do something fun and crazy and this was the perfect room to do it because my husband and I were the only ones who would see it. At the time, I was obsessed with the HGTV show Design Star and one of the contestants did these amazing and funky murals on the walls of several of her projects. This was my inspiration. The room is a long rectangle shape so we painted the two long walls bright white and the two short walls a pretty light slate blue. I then went on Google Images and found this pattern…



I painted so that it appeared to creep up the wall from behind the dryer. I also decided to paint it so that the vines on the blue walls were white and the vines on the white walls were blue.



I loved the effect but the long white wall still looked bare. I went "shopping" in the garage and found two pieces of plywood. I painted the two pieces the same blue that we used on the walls and used a white paint pen to write a fun saying. This is a simple and cheap project that anyone can do. I opened a word document and typed the saying that I was going to use in the fonts that I wanted. Then I just drew the letters on the boards free hand with a pencil using the word document as a guide. As a side note…you could use stencils to get the same effect. Once the words were drawn onto the boards I filled them in with the paint pen. This project was basically free!



So there it is…our finished project! I still have things that I want to do. I’ve told myself that I would buy wicker baskets to put stuff in for the shelves, however, as you can see there is not a basket to be found. I keep waiting until I find the sale of all sales but,alas, there have been none. Now I have space to do laundry in and I wish I could tell you that I spend hours doing our laundry like a "good wife" should. Sadly, I don't. I STILL HATE LAUNDRY!