After an Airy Makeover, You Can’t Tell This Laundry Room Is in a 40-Year-Old Basement
Basements don’t always scream “bright” and “cheery,” especially basement laundry rooms. Although homeowner Sherri and her husband originally hoped to move their laundry area to the second story of their house, the cost of moving plumbing and switching walls ended up being too expensive.
“We thought to ourselves, ‘Well, if this is going to remain in the basement, let’s redo it right and make it a room we love going into,’” Sherri says, adding that the before was “dingy and gross.”
“I would just shut the door and forget about it,” she says. That is, until she transformed her dreary basement laundry room for $2,200 with the help of vinyl flooring, bold paint, and some clever Velcro and wallboard disguises.
New flooring brightens the room — but was a bit of a challenge.
First, Sherri removed the laundry area’s “ugly” peel-and-stick floor tiles, which had been in the house since 1985. Although she had initially hoped to add ceramic tile to the space, it proved impossible, given the decades-old mastic glue from the old tiles that was stuck to the floor.
“I used every project imaginable and scraped it until my back almost gave out,” Sherri says — and still no luck. Instead, she and her husband decided to install luxury vinyl waterproof click flooring, which ended up paying off in the long run.
“The ceramic tiles I had originally chosen for the floor were expensive, and I likely would have had to call in a professional to install them,” she notes. “By altering the design of the room and using the vinyl flooring, I saved a lot of time and money, and it looks fantastic.”
Beadboard disguises pipes and wires without the mess of drywall.
The highly visible pipes along the wall in Sherri’s laundry space proved to be a major eyesore, and they were the number-one thing she wanted to change. Likewise, the ceiling showed exposed pipes and wires. Rather than undergoing the challenge of installing drywall, Sherri and her husband decided to use white beadboard for the laundry room walls and ceiling instead.
“It’s one of my favorite parts of the room! It looks very ‘vintage cottage,’ and we both love it,” Sherri says. “We painted the wallboard before we put it up, then did touchups on the screw holes. It made it much easier,” she says. (The paint color is Behr’s Moonlight Beach for the wallboard and trim.)
Sherri says one of the biggest challenges was adding the new beadboard to the lefthand side of the room while ensuring the water pipes were accessible. She and her husband built a frame around the piping, then Velcroed a piece of artwork over top; they can tear off the Velcro when they need to access the pipes. “I am pretty happy with our solution,” she says. “We almost changed the entire design of the room. I’m very glad we did not.”
They also added a curtain around the water heater and ductwork.
The new laundry room earns function and style points.
One of Sherri and her husband’s biggest “musts” in the space was to have a folding surface. To finish the project, they installed a pre-stained butcher block countertop. “It’s wonderful to have space to actually fold clothes fresh from the dryer and have a laundry sink!” Sherri says.
They also added more lighting overhead, thanks to a $7 flush-mount find from IKEA, and painted the walls dark brown (Behr’s Unpredictable Hue). “I love how the dark paint we chose seems to vibe well with the dark wood counters,” Sherri says.
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