Before and After: This Bland White Laundry Room Gets a Colorful, Fun-Packed Redo
Apartment Therapy staffers and readers are no strangers to colorful rooms of every type — even colorful laundry rooms, like this blue and orange one and this moody green one. While this laundry room belonging to DIYer Aiesha Mullings (@amullingsdesignstudio) started out all-white, Aiesha’s work helped it become another colorful laundry room to add to the inspo list. (In fact, it may be one of the most colorful washing and folding spaces ever!)
“The before was the builder-grade color beige,” Aiesha says of her laundry room, which came with a utility sink and white wire shelves. By many standards, it was a totally normal, no-frills laundry room.
“I wanted to make a change because I do not like normal,” Aiesha says. “I like to think outside the box and do something unique to a space.” In the One Room Challenge, and beforehand if you count the new white marble-y floors, Aiesha gave the room a personality-packed redo. The uniqueness came via wallpaper, paint, and artwork.
Aiesha designed her own wallpaper and uploaded it to Spoonflower for printing. “I wanted something that looked like falling water without it being so literal,” Aiesha says of her wallpaper design. For extra fun, she zhuzhed up the front of her plain white sink with it, too, and covered that with a waterproof seal.
“I also spray painted the fixtures because I could not find the perfect one for my space,” Aiesha says of the faucet — she used rose gold spray paint for that. She painted the rest of the walls and the ceiling coral (Sherwin-Williams’ Stone Fruit.) For the trim in the room, she went with something a little darker, a red from Sherwin-Williams called Beetroot. These corals and reds also show up in Aiesha’s shimmery wallpaper.
Aiesha used some of the leftover red paint to create a clothesline mural, and she added unconventional framed “artwork” that fits like a glove — er, sock. It’s a perfect DIY idea for any mateless socks you might have lying around. “Growing up on an island, we had clotheslines and not machines,” Aiesha says. “It just brought me back to my childhood days of washing and hanging the clothes to dry. I even had days where the line would break and would have to start the process all over! The nostalgia!”
In addition to fun, Aiesha’s redo adds functionality. Her new floors are easy to clean, and her new shelving above the washer and dryer offers more storage than the singular shelf before. Aiesha says if she could change one thing about the redo, she’d change her washing machine. She purchased her appliances before she mapped out her plan for the laundry room, but now, she wishes she would have purchased a front-loading washer rather than a top-loading one so she could build a folding table over the top of her appliances.
Aiesha’s best DIY advice, based on her experiences? “Make sure the space is functional, and at the end of it you have no regrets.” Both are certainly true of her laundry room.
As for her favorite pieces: “OMG, where do I begin?!” she says. “I love the color, the calmness of the space, and just how everything flows — from the artwork to the shelves. It was all intentional in design and very functional. Each item now has a space to call home, and I can have less clutter.”
This project was completed for the Spring 2023 One Room Challenge, in partnership with Apartment Therapy. See even more of the One Room Challenge before and afters here.
Inspired? Submit your own project here.