Our Home Remodel: Laundry Room

The laundry room—the room that gets the most use in any homes, but seem to be one of the last places that get updated. When we bought our home our children were young….super young, I think maybe 2 & 4. Our lives were full of crafts & messes & being home a lot. The laundry room in the home was & is huge, but it didn’t really function well for our needs at the time.

This isn’t the best photo, but it’s from the initial listing.  You can see the desk in the corner, a large folding area & a storage closet. Then where the photographer is standing was another closet that held the washer & dryer, plus a sink. 

When we initially remodeled the house, we did minor things to this room. We opened up the closet that you see in the image above & changed it to functional storage cabinets. We kept the desk & got rid of the upper cabinets. The desk was my hub, to pay bills & do a little bit of work while the kids were crafting. We removed that center island. We also opened up the closet that housed the washer & dryer because why have them in a closet? New tile floors, countertops, paint & a larger window really opened up the space. Now I’m all about designing for how you live your life. Would a beautiful countertop to fold laundry been the top of my list, of course, but at the time, with the kids so little, I needed a place that we could get messy with crafts. We did wood floors everywhere else, but I decided to do tile in here because of the messes. We also added a craft table to the space too.

So on the large wall, we added a cute little desk where the kids could do crafts & get messy. (Cue the tears because of how little my girl was). My dad made the desk & the old tool box was my late paw paw’s & we used it to store paper, markers, watercolors, pencils, etc. You can shop this look HERE.

This space worked great for us for many years. The kids would craft, I could be close by paying bills or moving laundry over. I never actually folded laundry in this room until 2020. I always folded it on the couch for 2 reasons. One because I tried to do laundry while the kids were napping & I could watch a favorite show & two because I had no folding space whatsoever in here.

This space grew with the kids & they eventually did homework at this desk, but then it became my folding table once they stopped using it. Fast forward to 2022 when I was itching to get this space functional for our family. The kids are preteens now. They do their homework at our kitchen island. We no longer need a dedicated craft space & this momma desperately needed some functional storage, folding & hanging space. Krissy, my operations manager for MHI & also my cabinet planner extraordinaire, came to my rescue & helped me plan out the new laundry room layout. Function was the most important thing to me. Once we got that figured out, I could handle the rest of making it pretty. And y’all, it’s both the most functional & pretty laundry room that I could ever need.

This wall of cabinets became my folding area with trash can storage, technology storage, a wrapping storage area, & full built in closets for cleaning supplies. I love folding laundry here (if anyone actually can enjoy folding laundry) and looking out the front of the house.

The washer dryer area has more storage for us. With pull out drawers to house my laundry detergent, so that I don’t have to reach up to get it. Plus pull outs for dog food for our sweet pup, Hank. We kept the deep sink in it’s same location because it comes in handy when the kids get their shoes too muddy or when clothes need to soak before I get to them.

Then the area of where my desk use to be. We added more folding & much needed hanging space to this area & completed it with a laundry basket nook for ever family member. On a good day, there is clean laundry folded in there for each of us to put away. The precious rolling cart is used daily when the kids drop laundry down the chute (hidden behind that upper cabinet door). It falls directly into the cart & when I’m ready to wash, I just roll the cart over to the washing machine & get to work.

Again, I’m all about designing for function. The laundry rooms served us well when the kids were little & we have known all along that this is our forever home, so when the time was right, it was time to update this space to make it work for us now & into the future.

You can grab all the details of the laundry room over on Our Home Details page. You can also shop all the accessories from the room over on the Shop My Home. Just know that a lot of the items are vintage (rug, laundry baskets, crocks & spools), so I don’t have a direct source for them, but have worked to try to find something similar in case you want to recreate the look in your own. home.