Week 1: One Room Challenge

April 01, 2015

Hello! I am excited to participate in my first One Room Challenge with 19 other wonderful bloggers for the next 6 weeks. If you are new here I am hoping you will want to stay!

When Linda from Calling it Home extended the invitation to me I was in the process of planning a small renovation here at home for our laundry room, so this was the perfect opportunity for me to share the progress of that project with you. This is a room that is definitely unorganized and too small for it's true purpose. I will say however that it is better than the laundry situation in our last house which was out in the garage.

When I start a project for myself it definitely becomes a work in progress, we make decisions on site and often it evolves into something as we go along, which is very different than how I work with clients. I had posted about my inspiration for the spaceon the blog several weeks ago but since that time it has changed quite a bit. In the beginning I just wanted to update the space- the hard surfaces and the colors and add some more usable storage space. I cannot wait to show you where we have decided to go with all of this.. for now lets start with the current space and a little bit of inspiration, you can follow along here and on instagramover the next 6 weeks.

This is our starting place...

The laundry room is one of two remaining spaces in the house that still had this tile flooring left in it. This originally covered the entire bottom level, so I definitely was replacing the tile. The walls were just plain white and had the original cabinets and sink from when the house was built. After finally buying a matching washer and dryer set at the end of last year we decided that it was time to get this room to function and look a little bit better.

My plan was to put a counter top above the washer and dryer to use for folding clothes and to hide all of the water controls, drain and outlets.

The other item on my list was to replace the cabinets with open shelves.

I was not able to find a specific laundry room that inspired me so I had a few pictures of the overall color scheme and feeling I wanted the space to convey.

This floor makes my heart skip a beat so I needed to find a space to do something similar and the laundry room is the perfect small space to experiment. The biggest challenge was finding a matte black slate tile that fit what I wanted.

For the counter top I wanted to use a marble slab and I was still undecided on the sink and cabinet below.

After starting to plan the project and finding the slab that I wanted I found some 1 x 2" herring bone marble mosaic tile that I had to have. I decided to use it behind the open shelves for a little detailing.

There was a lot of discussion about replacing the cabinets with open shelving- my husbands favorite question is "what will you do with all the crap that's in there?" I always put the really practical stuff on the back burner... because I had to have these brackets.