Easy DIY, Home Decor, Laundry Room
I am finally ready to share our laundry room with you! This was one of the first major rooms we tackled since moving into our new home. Sadly, we sort of downgraded our laundry room from our old house. We loved the floor plan which was what sold us, but had to sort of sacrifice our laundry room.
It sits in the center of our house and has no windows and gets very little light. To say it was hard to capture this space in photos would be an understatement! We just have 2 kids, so I honestly don't spend a ton of time doing laundry.
I can't image how much time I'd be spending in this room if we had 3 or 4 kids! Anyways, I actually have 2 DIYS to share within this post. First is this super easy butcher block counter DIY.
I had Ryan write up the how to on this post. This was his first time creating a butcher block counter and I can't believe how well it turned out! We ended up making them for our mudroom (that post will be coming soon - hopefully!).
We also DIY'd these floating shelves which were actually really easy. I don't think I'll ever buy store made floating shelves again. Here is our DIY as told by Ryan!
Moving to our new house we had to give up a few things in our laundry room. This had been one of the few rooms in our old house that we had upgraded, added a ton of cabinets, and laundry drawers. Now that we’ve settled into our new house, it was time to upgrade our new laundry room and make it more functional, but also try something new.
I wanted to do a countertop over the washer and dryer. Previously we had pretty large pedestals, but those didn’t fit under our cabinets. With the washer and dryer sitting on the floor, I wanted to make the space above them usable. I decided to do this with a natural hardwood. Chelsee loves wood with knots and other imperfections, so I decided to use a knotty alder.
The counter wasn’t too difficult, just time consuming. I started with measuring the length and depth I needed and buy my lumber for this. I wanted to do a waterfall style counter, I also needed the height for a separate piece for the end.
With the lumber back home, it was time to cut it to length and start lining it up in how I wanted the counter to look. I did my best to alternate the grain direction. Since this was going to be a counter, I also cut out the worst of the knots. This made some of my pieces shorter, but that helped keep the look for the top random sizes. After the boards were cut and laid out, it was just a matter of glueing them and clamping them.
you're going to need a lot of clamps for this project
lots of glue!
While clamping, I attempted to keep the boards level so there wouldn’t be large ridges that needed sanded. Try as I might, this was still going to require a lot of sanding after it was glued up.
The vertical piece was done just like the countertop. Once both pieces were done, I cut a 45 degree angle on each so they’d match up nicely. Now it was time to put a polyurethane on the wood to protect it and increase the durability. I did 3 coats.
Mounting the countertop was a bit tricky since I didn’t want to move the washer and dryer out of the room, but I screwed a couple pieces of 1x2 to the walls hitting as many studs as possible. This would help hold the weight of the counter on the side and back. I then used some 90 degree brackets to join the countertop with the vertical riser.
If you try and do this yourself, you’ll need to make sure you adjust the build for any obstacles you have. I had to put a small hole in the back so the outlet for the washer could pass through.
With the counter top in, next up was some shelves. We love the look of floating shelves, but had never built anything like that before. I wanted to have them match the countertop, so off to the hardware store for more knotty alder. I also picked up some 1x2’s to make a bracket. We have some floating shelves from IKEA and I figured I could make a bracket out of wood that could be used the same as the IKEA metal bracket.
Since the shelves would go wall to wall, I didn’t have to worry about adding ends, just the top, bottom, and front. The since of the shelves were hollow so I could put the bracket in. I got a little carried away with my building and didn’t take any pictures of my brackets, but it’s a 1x2 that goes the width of the wall with a few 10” pieces that extend out.
For the shelf, the process was very similar to the counter, cut, glue, clamp. The only difference is I left the knots in this time.
Just before I was going to install the shelves, Chelsee suggested it would look really good if the wall was black. So off I ran to pickup some tricorn black for the wall. This is the same paint used on our front door and garage door. Check out the post about our exterior paint choice here!
we didn't capture as many photos of these shelves as we should have. They are hollow in the middle and the brackets had 3 'prongs' to set the hollow part of the shelf in
We painted the wall, then I got out the laser level so I could get the shelves nice and level. Then I mounted each shelf one at a time. They are extremely sturdy!
Our laundry room is a lot more functional for us, and I think it turned out pretty good.
We found a company that sells shelves this same size and they cost $665 per shelf. We paid a total of $300 for all 3 shelves! For the butcher block counter, we spent $200. If you were to have this made, it would cost around $500.
Ok, now for the pretty pictures and styled shelves! We added a drying rack to the left side of the wall and a hook for our ironing board behind the door. I grabbed these from Amazon. For our shelves, I grabbed these glass canisters for our laundry balls, scent beads, and OxiClean. I added some basics to hide things I don't want out and some decor and greenery. I really didn't purchase anything new, but pulled things from the rest of our house. Shopping your house for decor is a great budget tip!
I got these cute wire laundry baskets from Target. They're not as great as our pull out laundry baskets, but we'll make sure to add those in our next house! We have 3 baskets - one for darks, one for whites, and one for pinks!
large canister // small canister
I loved adding this drying rack. It's a must for us and it also folds up against the wall if you don't want it sticking out.
Board and Batten DIY // Bathroom Shiplap DIY // How to Install Ceiling Shiplap
Ok, I know that was a lot! Please let me know if you have any specific questions that we might not have covered. Thanks so much for reading, and stay tuned for more DIY's!
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