Before and After: A $300 Redo Pulls This Dull Laundry Room Out of the ’70s

If you don’t live in a new build, you most likely have at least one room that still reflects the very different from modern-day decade in which your home was constructed. And when you’re working on updating the rest of your home—maybe with a modern farmhouse kitchen or a Scandi-inspired bedroom—that one extra room can stick out like a sore thumb. In the case of Lindsey Mahoney of Building Bluebird, it was her laundry room. “When we moved into our home, the laundry room was a good size, but it was very dated,” Lindsey says. Its past-their-prime features included a dirty-looking linoleum floor and a baby blue Formica countertop with baby blue walls to match. “It quickly became the dumping ground for items we wanted to be hidden from our every day living space,” Lindsey says, and she wanted to bring it up to speed with the rest of her home.

“I believe it is important to create an inspiring space especially when you spend so much time completing not-so-fun tasks like laundry,” Lindsey says. Her plan was to completely overhaul the overall vibe of the space, but stick to a strict budget at the same time. The winning strategy? Paint, of course!

Lindsey went with a light green shade (Behr’s Back to Nature) for the cabinets and covered up the baby blue walls with white (Behr’s Polar Bear). She also worked with Rust-Oleum HOME Floor Coating to cover the floor in a checkered tile pattern without actually having to blow her budget on a real re-tiling. “The most time-consuming portion of the project was definitely painting the floors,” Lindsey says. “Drawing the pattern on the floor and then taping it out and painting it gave me a bit of a stiff back but it was absolutely worth it for the beautiful results.”

Another way Lindsey cut costs was choosing to cover her countertops in contact paper from Amazon, rather than fully replacing them. Once the main changes were made, Lindsey purchased artwork from Juniper Print Shop, and finished off the space with simple accents like a small stack of books, a circular tray, and a vase of eucalyptus. The entire project took a few months to finish, but in the end she was able to do a complete 180 with only $300.

The moral of the story? “Paint is so powerful, and you can change the entire feel of a room by using paint,” Lindsey says.

Inspired? Submit your own project here.