Laundry Room Redo

Our laundry room is finally finished! For years I've wanted to update this space to be much more functional for our family. We love having a mudroom (especially since we adopted the asian mentality of taking your shoes off when you come in the door), but the space was just not working for our needs. There was no place to take off or put on shoes, and the open shelving above the washer/dryer just became a dumping ground for junk. It's like a junk drawer but all over your walls....not pretty. Here is what the space has looked for over the past 5 years...

I know, it was a totally sexy space. It's way sexier now; take a look:

Oh man, I love it! It's not just functional, it's pretty! The mudroom wall has to be my favorite...and it was all built by my talented husband! As usually happens, I gave Clarence a few inspiration pictures and he made it happen. He started with the bench along the bottom so we had somewhere to sit and put on our shoes. He had to custom build it according to the measurements of our wall (my math-deficient mind doesn't even want to think about it). Baskets beneath hold our shoes. Then he added pre-made shiplap above that, and more cubbies for storage on the top. We already had those baskets, so he wanted to make the cubbies specifically for them. Once we went to install, we realized it was way too high, so he had to lower it and build molding to help it reach the ceiling. It looked pretty strange to me until we got the "stay awhile" sign for a white elephant gift at Christmas and it fit in that space perfectly!

The framed art was an 8 year wedding anniversary gift from Clarence. It tells our love story by year and is printed on linen (The 8 year traditional gift). It was such a sweet and thoughtful present!

On the washer/dryer side, I knew I wanted some cabinets we could close to hide all of our stuff. We ordered a few unfinished cabinets from Home Depot and I painted them "Weekend" by Magnolia Home. It's such a gorgeous, bold color which I felt this room needed. We stained a few boards to match the mudroom bench and ordered some black brackets to hold them up.

It makes me so happy to walk in that room now! It's pretty, clean, and SO MUCH more functional! Here are our sources and total breakdown:

Wood: Clarence used a lot of stuff he had lying around, but spent about $100 additional
Wall paint: Moonshine by Benjamin Moore. Had on hand (since 2015 haha)
White paint for cubbies: had on hand
Shiplap: $80 (there are def cheaper ways to do this, but Clarence wanted to go for ease)
Grey Baskets: $63.57
"Stay Awhile" sign: Christmas gift
Top Baskets: had already
Black coat hooks: $16.99
Rug: $66.77 (now priced 39.99!!)
Unfinished cabinets: $188.68
Magnolia paint: $20 for a quart
Black brackets: $46.96
Gold cabinet hardware: $15.89
Schoolhouse light: $20 at Pottery Barn Outlet
Laundry sign: $23.69

Total spent: $642.55

This is actually the first time I've added it all up. It's not bad for an entire room, but I'm also thankful we did it slowly over about 3 months to stretch the spending out. Overall, I'm super happy with how it turned out. Let me know if I missed anything you wanted more information on!

Up next? Abel's room (once we move the girl's in together).