In the cold light of day, the laundry room is one of the least exciting rooms in the house. To find a more boring and potentially drab space, you’d probably have to check out the attic or the basement crawl space where you store the Christmas tree.
Yet most families end up spending a lot of time in the laundry room, washing, drying, ironing folding and fighting tough stains. These time constraints just get higher when you add kids to the equation. Especially little kids who have ingenious ways of staining clothes, or teenagers who can’t seem to figure out how to pour laundry soap into a washing machine without making a mess.
It seems clear, that if you’re going to be forced to spend a lot of time in your laundry room, then it shouldn’t feel like a prison sentence. So, we decided to pull together some fun laundry room makeover ideas to add a little joy to the clothes washing experience. A lot of them even help steam line the laundry room by keeping things thoughtfully organized.
Wall Treatments For Visual Flair
If you walk into a lot of laundry rooms, you’ll be greeted by drably painted white, gray or beige walls. Some just have exposed drywall that’s begging for a coat of paint.
Though, there’s no one saying that you have to limit yourself to painting your laundry room walls. You can dare to be bold with wallpaper, but then you’re putting paper near water. Instead, you might want to consider stepping up to add a tile wall. Subway tiles are available in staggering shades and visually interesting patterns.
Best of all, tiles usually have a gloss or semi-gloss sheen to them. This helps redirect some of the ambient light in your laundry room, without creating a lot of eye-tiring glare.
Add An Island For Tasteful Storage & Folding
If you have a particularly large laundry room, you might want to consider adding a center island or a stone countertop. This will give you space for drawers and lower cabinets to help store things away for a tastefully clean-looking laundry room.
It also gives you more flat space to do things like fold clothes before putting them in their designated basket. It’s especially helpful for folding clothes that have pleats or need a clean folded line.
Install A Cabinet-Mounted Pull-Down Ironing Board
If you were to take a poll, a lot of people would tell you that they’ve argued with a stubborn ironing board more than once in their lives. A pull-down ironing board lets you set up the board in a matter of moments without needing an aerospace engineering degree. You can then tuck it away into the wall when you’re done ironing your clothes.
A lot of pull-down ironing boards are built into shallow cabinets with doors. They add to the overall décor of your laundry room. The inside doors of the cabinet can also serve as functional storage space for irons and other small laundry accessories.
Cabinets With Glass Doors
A lot of laundry rooms have cabinets with plain-looking wooden doors that are drab and boring. They offer up functional storage with little in the way of aesthetics. Yet you can often remove the center wood from the cabinet door frame itself.
With a little care, you can then add a pain of plexiglass, textured glass, or frosted glass and glaze it into place, just like replacing a windowpane. The aesthetic options are endless, and it might even help you, or the members of your family who rarely frequent the laundry room to find the things they need.
Pull Down Shelves With Hangers
A lot of laundry rooms in a basement have more than 8-foot-high ceilings. Especially if your home has a partial or unfinished basement. If your laundry room is blessed with a lot of vertical space, you might want to install a pull-down shelf.
It’s a great place to store lesser-used or seasonal items in boxes or lightweight totes to help keep the room cleanly organized. The addition of a hanger rod gives you a place to hang freshly ironed clothes without having to immediately deliver them to an upstairs closet.
Cubbies & Colorful Fabric Totes
A cubby on its own is a functional storage space made for modern organization. Yet it’s also a little drab and boring to the point that even the most interesting coat of paint isn’t going to help it much in the way of aesthetics.
Yet with the addition of a few colorful cloth tote bins, a humble cubby can take on a whole new level of visual interest. Best of all, the tote even improves the storage capacity of the cubby. Especially if you install adjustable shelves to let you load it with two or more totes. It’s a great way to hide the eyesore of laundry detergent and dryer sheets.
A Pull-Down Drying Rack
The truth is there are a lot of modern-day garments that you can’t dry in the dryer and you can’t feasibly air dry outside in the winter. A simple pull-down drying rack can be easily installed onto a wall with a spring-loaded hinge. Multiple dowels then give you three or even four poles to let things air dry. It’s a true godsend if you need to get multiple kids’ pairs of snow pants dry in one night!
Then when you’re done using it, you can simply disengage the spring-loaded hinge to fold it back up against the wall. The rack can be painted to carefully blend in with the décor of the laundry room, or in a contrasting color to add some visual pop to an otherwise visually boring room.
Add An Area Rug
A lot of laundry rooms are down in the basement, where the floor grows cold in the winter and the walls are bare and boring. Sometimes adding a simple area rug gives the room some much-needed color. It’s a relatively inexpensive addition. It also gives your toes a little bit of warm insulation against the cold concrete floor of most basement laundry rooms.
