Navy Laundry Room Makeover and a Giveaway

When it snows, I apparently paint. Yup, we had 3 crazy snow days the other week, my kids were home from school and I started to go a little stir crazy in my house. So, I did the only logical thing on the planet, I dropped my kids off down the street at my mom’s house and drove to Ace Hardware…

in a complete blizzard…

here I’ll show you –

yeah there is a road in there somewhere!

I blame the laundry for my momentary lapse in sanity…

I legit hate doing laundry and it kept piling up and piling up with all the wet clothes my kids kept coming in with from outside. In lieu of actually doing said laundry, I decided the only thing to do was completely makeover my laundry room instead. Clearly I can’t do laundry in a room that’s being painted right? See, logical!

PS – this room is so hard to photograph, because it’s so long and narrow, so hang in there with me!

Also, the laundry room needed a redo bad, you might remember the BEFORE  looking like this –

Not so bad right? Well, that was before little man got his hands on it…literally

He found my ink pad and cute custom return address stamp and decided to make his own “wallpaper” on the walls. Our address was stamped on the wall about 150 times, we were for sure not going to forget where we lived anytime soon…there was also some lovely black finger print abstract art as well, which saved me time dusting for fingerprints…

It was time for some paint in here, preferably paint dark enough to cover up my son’s artistic endeavors.

This month’s Ace Hardware challenge was perfect, they wanted us to break a paint rule, as following rules is not exactly my strong suit (nor little man’s apparently), this was right up my alley.

Most of my house is white, and I love white paint, but I was craving a darker color for once. Hence I set out to prove, you can indeed paint a small room a dark color. The color I chose was Cadet Song by Valspar. I love this grayish navy color, it’s so dark, it’s just shy of black.

It makes the room feel so cozy, like I may just hang out here now, maybe.

To offset the dark color (and the fact that I have black countertops in here, there I go breaking another rule mixing navy and black, but I happen to think navy and black look fab together) I planked the large wall that I call my command center.

The good news was, it gave me just the look I wanted and I was so excited for an excuse to haul out my power tools again.

The bad news – I needed to buy 10 ft planks…

which meant I needed to drive with said planks sticking out my window…

which meant that not only was I driving in a total white out, but it was actually snowing inside my car as well. I had a good inch of snow in my front seat by the time I made it home. Just another day in the life :)

The other thing I built in this room that I LOVE is this long shelf across the back wall. Not only does it stop random socks and stuff from falling down behind the washer and dryer, but it gave me a cute spot to decorate.

Since I was going all out with my power tools, I built this little shelf over here by my mail center. I lovingly refer to it as the Mr.’s “phone timeout shelf”. I drilled a little hole in the shelf to make it the perfect charging station for his phone, bonus we now get work free dinners with the family as his phone is in “timeout” until the kids go to bed at night.

 On top of the plank wall you may have noticed I rearranged things a bit. I got this enormous and just way cool wall calendar, which the Mr. likes to joke is just the right size for my senior citizen eyes (no joke I’m totally as blind as a bat, like think coke bottle lenses for my glasses, and then probably double that and you have my situation).

I also bought a few clipboards and printed out chore charts for our kids. My girlie kept complaining the reason she couldn’t do her chores was she couldn’t remember what they were. Ask and you shall receive darling! The clipboards are just hung on a nail, so I can take them down and hand them over to my kids after school, then they can go right down the list.

I kept the same wire storage wall unit, but instead of looking at a bunch of messy papers I stuck cute folders inside to tidy things up a bit.

Oh and check out my cute new recycling bins! I picked up a few metal trashcans at Ace and then hit them with some glossy white spray paint for a nice clean look.

This space works so much better for us now! Proof sometimes breaking the rules isn’t such a bad thing, just don’t tell my daughter…

How about you? Any major painting projects coming up, to help keep the stir crazy away this winter? Enter my giveaway below for your chance to win $100 gift card to Ace Hardware and start your own fab room makeover! Giveaway will be open for 1 week, winner will be notified via email.

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Disclosure: I’m a member of the Ace Hardware Blogger Panel. Ace Hardware provided me with products and compensation for this post, but all opinions are 100 percent mine. All opinions and positions here do not necessarily reflect those of Ace Hardware.

UPDATE: You can find all the laundry room sources here.