$206 laundry room update and cabinets!
The space above a washer and dryer is often pretty empty, maybe with just a wimpy shelf. I know laundry rooms don't have to be glamorous, just functional--but one shelf is not functional. Our townhouse and our early 90's builder basic fixer upper home came with one shelf. What the heck!
I dreamed of filling the space with clean white cabinets for storing detergent and other utility room items. I searched the Habitat for Humanity Restore many times back when I was working on our townhouse, with measurements, looking for some old cabinets I could paint and hang. I never found any, but I also never felt super confident installing them myself. Well, throwing yourself into a massive fixer upper project with very little budget can change that!
Cosmetic Laundry Room Updates
Here's the "before"--from when we moved in. Sad.
Here's what it looked like for several months. We painted the trim and interior door, got a new door to the garage (the old one was super dented and the handle was just SCREWED on, it didn't even turn!), gave it some fresh paint, and installed more laminate flooring.
The biggest problem in this room was that the old dryer vent in the floor was a few inches out from the wall, so we couldn't push the dryer against the wall and couldn't put the door back on. New front-load washer/dryer sets are not built for most home designs, we've found! We had a similar problem in our townhouse and had to replace our pocket doors with a curtain.
Jason cut the opening in the hole bigger and we laid flooring over it to cover up the patching. Then we could put the dryer back and put the door on!
Laundry Cabinets
Since I had given up on my used cabinet search (looking for cabinets exactly the right width, and not too dirty or rickety), I looked around for something new and affordable. You can probably get IKEA ones just the right size, and they have some cheap options, but I found this Shaker style white cabinet at Home Depot on sale at the time for only $103. It came in a 30" height and 36" height, (and probably others), and I looked at the space and chose the shorter one so we'd have enough room to put taller laundry baskets on top of the machines. So I spent $206 on two brand new, already white cabinets. Not bad!!
Ordering the cabinets was not easy; they sold out of one of them online so I had to call, I forget exactly what happened... and I had them shipped to the store, which took a few weeks. Then one of them was super broken when we opened it up at home, so I had to take it back and there was an issue re-ordering it at the store so I had to wait another like 6 weeks for the replacement. Luckily we weren't in a hurry when I started this process. (And, I guess you get what you pay for.)
Installing them was super easy, though. We chose to reuse the solid piece of wood that was under our shelf as an easy, stable base for the cabinets (we painted it white). We leveled everything and screwed the cabinets into studs.
You have to remove the cabinet doors and then put them back on, which is slightly annoying, but at least you don't have to build the cabinets from scratch like you do with IKEA ones.
Though as you can see, these are also not real wood. They're great for a laundry room, but not sure if I'd want them in a kitchen (though they are kitchen cabinets).
Oh, and I used the four cute black round handles I had left over from our IKEA Hemnes bathroom vanity hack! So they were free.
While I had dreamed of finding the cabinets that were the perfect width, I ended up with two 30" wide ones in a 62" wide space. I planned to install a filler piece and some trim at the far edge, but the cabinets don't need it for stability, and I decided it looks okay as-is.
So... one less thing do do. Score.
These cabinets aren't organized to the nines, but what a HUGE improvement from trying to cram all of our stuff on an old, narrow shelf!
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