A laundry face-lift: Whether you have $300 or $3,000
Homeowners say it’s made them more enthusiastic about wash day.
When Monica Dewald and Tamthy Le bought their house in Renton, Wash., last year, the laundry room was run down with a rust-covered dryer. Now it’s a miniature disco, complete with dark-pink walls and a rotating, multicolored overhead light.
“When you open the door, it feels like there’s a party going on,” Dewald said.
While such a utilitarian space may not seem like it deserves much attention, homeowners who’ve given their laundry rooms a face-lift say it’s actually made them more enthusiastic about doing the wash. Because laundry rooms are typically tucked away, the space is an opportunity to take risks with patterns and colors (and, yes, disco lights) even if they don’t match the rest of the house.
Beyond aesthetics, rethinking a laundry room can also improve its functionality, allowing for easier access to detergent, for example, or creating more storage. And while you can certainly splurge on high-end finishes and a professional interior designer, those things aren't required to create a space that'll make folding and ironing feel less like punishment.
Dewald, a public school teacher, and Le, a nonprofit administrator, spent under $100 on their entire project, which they tackled in their spare time for about two weeks. Their budget covered paint, a disco lightbulb, a decorative disco ball, and mirror tape to cover the rust on the top of the dryer. The darker paint and low lighting also help mask imperfections on the walls. As a fun bonus, the room is viewable from another room through a peek-a-boo opening in some built-in shelves. Dewald said it feels like peering into a speakeasy.
Liz Butler, a full-time parent near Tampa, felt the need to do heavier renovations to her family’s laundry room. “The aesthetic of it did not make me want to be in there,” Butler said. “It was also not very functional.”
With the help of her husband, Scott, they redid the floors, cabinets, and décor, all for about $2,000. “I’m a budget shopper,” Liz Butler said. “I will find the deals, and I will wait on the deals or scour Facebook Marketplace.”
Among her biggest scores for the laundry room: tiles on clearance at Lowe’s for 7 cents apiece, and cabinetry from a liquidation warehouse. The priciest item turned out to be a slab of butcher block for $270, which the couple used to make a folding station. They chose NextWall peel-and-stick wallpaper in a dark-hued garden print for an accent wall. Butler then took a swatch of it to Lowe’s, where the staff helped her pick matching blue paint for the cabinetry and trim. To improve the lighting, they replaced a fluorescent tube light with a ceiling fixture and sconce from Amazon. Wall baskets were the finishing touch.
The couple saved big by doing most of the labor — though only being able to chip away at the project on weekends meant it took about five months.
Niky Foster, a content creator in Delaware, spruced up her laundry room last year on a
$600 budget, around half of which went to new cabinets from The Home Depot. (She replaced the included knobs with hardware from Amazon that fit her style.)
Foster zhuzhed up the walls herself using stick-on vinyl and a Cricut machine — a device linked to an app that lets users create and print custom patterns for craft projects. The result looks like wallpaper, but is easier to apply and remove. Foster decants laundry products into glass jars for better visibility (and aesthetics). She also bought collapsible laundry baskets that take up less space. “I really thought through the process of all the things I need when I do laundry and where they are,” Foster said. “Everything has a home.”
The countertop over the machines was installed by a contractor. It's made of plywood and was finished with a layer of clear polyurethane.
Another DIY content creator, Alexis Combs, is sharing the process of her laundry room renovation on her YouTube channel. So far, she and her husband have removed a closet, utility sink, and a layer of linoleum flooring.
Major renovations aren’t new to the couple, who surprised Combs’s parents with a $300 laundry room renovation at their house in South Carolina a couple of years ago.
For those with larger budgets, an interior designer can add expert insight. Stephanie Vanderveldt, a physician in Atlanta, tapped Michele Gratch Interiors to help redo her laundry room, which was part of a larger house renovation. She chose to work with Gratch both because she loved her style and didn't feel qualified to do the job herself.
“The finished product is much more than I ever could have accomplished on my own,” Vanderveldt said. She estimated that about $10,000 went to the laundry room, which included replacing the counters, cabinetry, washer, and dryer.
The room’s most eye-catching detail, however — wallpaper patterned with illustrations of French bulldogs — was chosen by Vanderveldt herself, in homage to her two dogs. Before meeting with the firm, she’d already picked out the pattern from Spoonflower. She told Gratch it was nonnegotiable.
Though wallpaper is usually much pricier than painting (in this case, it cost $1,500), Vanderveldt said she has no regrets about the personal touch: “It happens to be the room that you see right when you come up the stairs, and it always makes me smile.”