Laundry Room Decor Options

Now that we have our stunning new stackable, energy efficient Samsung washer & dryer (in a lovely charcoal grey) , we are rejigging the laundry room to make better use of the space in there.

Originally the room was laid out with side by side appliances as you can see here…

Nevertheless, the new stackable appliances don’t really work with the old layout so we’re taking a couple walls back to the studs and adjusting the plumbing and electrical for the new layout. Here’s the new layout sketch to remind you…

And here is my mockup with the design elements I’m contemplating for around the sink.

It includes a floor to ceiling strip of light-light-green glass tile (along the lines of the image to the left from the Rambling Renovators blog), stacked washer dryer, our old utility sink with a new pull down faucet and a rolling storage trolly next to it.

There were also a few practical aspects to remodelling that I made sure to include – having learned lessons from other reno-bloggers (like ColdWorldReno): when reworking plumbing it’s best to do it once and do it right. Since we knew we would have to move a few pipes around, we decided to use the opportunity of having the walls open to add a few other things.

1) RECESSED PIPES: One of the most annoying things in laundry rooms is the number of awkward pipes and wires coming out of walls which inevitably take up too much space and look ugly. Thankfully, there are some handy gadgets available today that can help hide some of these. Below is one of these handy pipe recessing-thingies (yes that’s what it’s called) that you can screw into your wall studs before putting up the drywall saving you inches of space that enable your appliances to sit flush against the wall. Super handy.

Here it is in all its glory…

2) REINFORCE DRYWALL: Once the drywall is back up, and tiles installed, I’m hoping to have some shelves installed above the utility sink. This will require, of course, that we either install them directly into studs or use heavy duty drywall anchors to secure them. The latter is possible, however, I’ve never had much luck with them and don’t want to have to worry about limiting the weight on my shelves. Therefore, installing into studs it is! This method can be tricky business as I won’t be able to drill too many holes into the tile if we miss the first time, therefore we chose to install some extra wood in the wall to give us some wiggle room down the road. Clever indeed.

3) EXTRA PLUMBING: One of the handy things about our utility sink is that we can use it to attach the garden hose when I need to wash my car or the deck, etc. The annoying thing about the old set up though was that we kept having to remove the water conserving adjustable faucet head whenever we attached the hose, and inevitably would never reattach it since it took too much effort – not very practical. So, one of the little extras I made sure we added this time was a dedicated bibcock (fancy name for ‘small faucet’) to the wall pipes for the sink that will allow us to attach the garden hose under the sink to it’s own dedicated line. The added upside to this is I can now get a fancy faucet for the sink with drop down sprayer (I would never have been be able to have one before) which will make it SO much easier to clean up. I know… I’m a genius!

The final element I’ve had trouble deciding on is what to do with the curved wall opposite the new sink wall. I’m pretty sure I want an interesting design/wallpaper feature for that wall, but keep changing my mind on what that should look like. There’s no natural light in this room, so I don’t want to go too dark, but I also don’t want it to be too ‘blah’ either.

Here are some of my favorite feature wall ideas to date…

What’s your favorite? Post below with your suggestions or if you have alternate ideas for the feature wall.