How to make over your laundry room – whether you have $300 or $3,000

THE WASHINGTON POST

When Monica Dewald and Tamthy Le bought their house in Renton, Wash. last year, the laundry room was run down with a rust-covered dryer. Now, it’s a miniature disco, complete with dark-pink walls and a rotating, multicolored overhead light.

“When you open the door, it feels like there’s a party going on,” says Dewald.

While such a utilitarian space may not seem like it deserves much attention, homeowners who’ve given their laundry rooms a facelift say it’s actually made them more enthusiastic about doing the wash. Because laundry rooms are typically tucked away, the space is an opportunity to take risks with patterns and colors (and, yes, disco lights) even if they don’t necessarily match the rest of the house.

Beyond aesthetics, rethinking a laundry room can also improve its functionality, allowing for easier access to detergent, for example, or creating more storage. And while you can certainly splurge on high-end finishes and a professional interior designer, those things aren’t required to create a space that’ll make folding and ironing feel less like punishment.

Dewald, a public-school teacher, and Le, a nonprofit administrator, spent under $100 on their entire project, which they tackled in their spare time for about two weeks. Their budget covered paint, a disco lightbulb, a decorative disco ball and mirror tape to cover the rust on the top of the dryer. The darker paint and low lighting also help mask imperfections on the walls. As a fun bonus, the room is viewable from another room through a peek-a-boo opening in some built-in shelves. Dewald says it feels like peering into a speakeasy.

Liz Butler, a full-time parent near Tampa, felt the need to do heavier renovations to her family’s laundry room. “The aesthetic of it did not make me want to be in there,” says Butler. “It was also not very functional.”

With the help of her husband, Scott, they redid the floors, cabinets and decor, all for about $2,000. “I’m a budget shopper,” says Liz Butler. “I will find the deals and I will wait on the deals, or scour Facebook Marketplace.”

Among her biggest scores for the laundry room: tiles on clearance at Lowe’s for 7 cents apiece, and cabinetry from a liquidation warehouse. The priciest item turned out to be a slab of butcher block for $270, which the couple used to make a folding station. They chose NextWall peeland-stick wallpaper in a dark-hued garden print for an accent wall. Butler then took a swatch of it to Lowe’s where the staff helped her pick matching blue paint for the cabinetry and trim. To improve the lighting, they replaced a fluorescent tube light with a ceiling fixture and sconce from Amazon. Decorative wall baskets were the finishing touch.

The couple saved big by doing most of the labor themselves – though only being able to chip away at the project

See Laundry, Page 6