Laundry Room Makeover Plan – ORC Spring 2023 Week 1

We’re moving our laundry room from inside the house to the garage, but you won’t believe how good it’s going to look when we’re finished. This will turn our garage into Garage Mahal!

This is week 1 of the Spring 2023 One Room Challenge. For those unfamiliar, ORC is a biannual challenge for interior designers, decorators and stylists to finish one room in their house in 8 weeks. The challenge is also open to guest participants like us. Every week we’ll be posting an update on our blog and on Instagram as we take you along with us as we transform a small corner of our garage into a stunning and functional laundry room.

Isn’t life supposed to slow down and get easier as you age?

What about all those cornball commercials on TV showing a pair of geezers doing exactly nothing with their perfect lives but walking aimlessly and smiling aggressively as they hawk adult diapers and cholesterol pills? They seem to have it all figured out.

So why am I still working like a rented mule in a thoroughbred race?

Where’s my rocking chair and glass of lemonade? I’ll even take the damn pills and wear the diapers!

Gah, forget it.

There’s no rest for the wicked weary, so let’s shelve the easy talk and get down to brass tacks. The truth is, last fall my babes invited me to enter One Room Challenge (translation: my babes announced I’d be entering One Room Challenge) as a guest participant.

This coincided almost to the day with the launch of our Halloween crafting season. So while I was trying to pump out two Halloween posts per week (with associated social media videos), I was also remodeling a room from floor to ceiling – with all the posts and pictures that went along with it.

It was hard, but it was also rewarding. And then there was this gem that I held onto dearly during our cold winter month:

“Don’t worry, my babes,” Handan said, “your schedule will be wide open for the spring One Room Challenge.”

She lies like a couch potato on game day.

She’s less truthful than a politician selling used cars.

Unless, of course, her definition of “wide open” includes a lanai makeover, a closet makeover, a pergola build, a gazebo build, a full house limewashing (solo), a parental visit, a living room makeover, an entire landscaping makeover, a fire pit makeover, tilling half the yard, re-seeding, re-planting and generally re-discovering just how little time is actually in a day!

But you didn’t come here to listen to me complain.

Or maybe you did? Because I can carry on, you know!

Oh, okay. I’ll clam it and get on with the business at hand.

Laundry Room Makeover

Cue the trumpets, gimme a drum roll…and add in a bassoon and a couple of piccolos to mix things up a bit, because I’m about to make a laundry room that’ll knock the sweat off your socks and make the chicken grease on your blouse tremble in fear.

As the final piece of our Garage Mahal makeover, this laundry room will be a marvel of form and function in a space normally reserved for sawdust and spiders.

But why the garage?

You may be wondering why on earth we’d be looking to move our clothing cleanatorium from a nice cozy inside space to a lowly garage.

Well, there are a few reasons.

First, the space the current laundry room resides – let’s call it a mud room for lack of a better word – is small and narrow, and those machines hog nearly the whole damn room.

Second, we have big plans for the kitchen, including and starting with re-routing the craft room stairs so they no longer empty into the kitchen, but rather turn 90 degrees to the right and empty into the current laundry.

Third, the current laundry room is actually the second laundry room. The original laundry hookups are in the (wait for it) GARAGE! Why is this important?

Because the garage dryer vents outside like any normal and sane dryer should. The current laundry room vents under the craft room stairs! How’s that for bold engineering?

Fourth, we need the mudroom…not for the mud but for the room. The lack of a basement haunts us at every turn in this house, so any bit of space not used is space wasted. By moving those machines outside, we’ll have more room for fabulous life-affirming storage!

And by extension, I’ll be able to build more storage around the laundry machines. It’s a win-win for our crap!

So now that you know the what, the where and by whom, and you understand the why, let’s look at the how.

Laundry Room Makeover Plan

Watch our short and fun video below for an overview of our laundry room makeover plan before you read the details of this makeover.

Laundry Room Makeover Details

The Heart

The heart of any laundry room is obviously the man toiling away in there to make sure the clothes emerge stain-free and smelling like a marketing team’s interpretation of spring rain.

The man (or woman – I’ve just been informed women do laundry, too) is the glorious and shining centerpiece of any laundry room. But we must force ourselves to look past the Chicken Stain Warriors, the Static Cling Commandos, the Bearded Brassiere Brigade, and the Lilac-scented Panty Pimps and appreciate their battle arena, in which they fight an endless war against dirt, grease, grass, blood, coffee, oops!, dammit!, I just washed this!, and what the hell is this?!?

Some might argue that Suds Man’s main weapons are the washer and dryer, and they are important, don’t get me wrong. But when it comes to tough stains and grease, the battle is won on the countertop above the washer. It’s all about the pre-sprays and secret formulas we all have and swear by to make our jobs easier. But for simplicity’s sake, let’s just say the washer and dryer are now the focal point.

In our new laundry room, they will take up residence on the left side.

Over and around them I will build an enclosure and countertop. Oh, I can’t wait for that! A year with naked machines has been almost too much to bear.

The Water

No laundry room should have to live without a sink and a faucet, and if that laundry room is in the garage, that sink better be deeper than Socrates to handle all the paint rollers, paint trays and buckets it will undoubtedly be cleaning.

I’m excited to replace this painted mess. Of course, it was clean when we moved here a year ago, so I shouldn’t look too askance at it. My goal is to keep the new one clean, because you better believe it’s going to look better than this work of modern art.

The Walls

It’s a garage laundry room at the end of the day, and even though I’m striving for a Garage Mahal, I’m going to stop short of the actual marble tile of the original Taj Mahal. In fact, I’m not going to put any sort of actual tile on the walls, marble or otherwise.

Instead, I’m going to try out some stick-on tiles. Less money, less work, and (as I mentioned), it’s a garage!

But! It’s still going to look like the Taj Mahal – just without the price tag and effort.

The Storage

Above the tile I’ll be installing cabinets, because if it doesn’t come with storage, it’s not welcome in this house!

We already have one amazing cabinet I’ll be hanging above the machines. You’d never think of something like this in a laundry room, but it’s going to be epic!

To the right of the proposed sink, next to the door leading into the house, I’ll be building a cabinet from floor to ceiling. That will create a little nookish entrance area, and I’ll be doing something to accentuate that area with wood slats. We’re planning to use brass knobs from EMTEK, though we haven’t settled on the final form of them.

The Floor

Though it’s a garage and a laundry room, the space deserves a kick-ass rug to complete the look. We’ve got our eyes on a few, including the one pictured in the mood board, but we’ll see what we ultimately choose.

The Light

The right lighting can make even me look halfway decent, so imagine what it can do for this space! We’re exploring a few different options for lighting that’ll not only light up the smelly socks and dirty dungarees but showcase our new laundry room in the most flattering light. We’ve got our eye on a few options from Alora – we’ll see which one gets the nod!

Click the ORC logo below to check out the other participants!

Here is our ORC progress

Week 1  ||  Week 3  ||  Week 5  ||  Week 7  ||  Week 8