Blue Jeans and Clean Socks

I feel like I should probably knock on some wood or cross myself twice and throw a teaspoon of salt over my left shoulder before saying what I'm about to say next, but I think we're pretty much done with the laundry room / mud room renovation.

I haven't talked much about the laundry room renovation, right? I love this house - it has great bones, but it's in need of some serious aesthetic updates. For our first style update, we decided on creating a functional mud /laundry room. This is our entry and exit point to the house, and we were needing a place to hang purses and book bags and hats. Plus, I wanted a pretty place to fold laundry. Something cheerful and simple. So, we smashed up the linoleum and ripped up the carpet, tore out cabinets and I endured what I have since come to think of as My Dark Period, during which we had, at one point neither a floor nor a working washing machine (and for many that might not be a big deal, but with two young children who attract mud like flies to honey and a exclusively cloth diapered baby, missing a day of laundry can send me into a mild panic attack.)

Here is what the laundry room looked like when we bought the house:

Hello, the 80s called, with its muted beige paint, fluorescent light and brown lineolum, thank you very much.

So what did we do? Well, we:

We like to put our little slave laborers, munchkins to work painting. They usually make an epic mess. 

• Took out the old cabinets, retextured the walls
• Ripped up the linoleum laundry room and the hallway carpet and put down a sub-floor, then tiled over the sub-floor with a porcelain tile that is meant to look like a neutral sand. I cannot tell you the conversations we had about this floor: it must be the most-discussed floor in the history of the world. We talked and talked and talked about this floor: which tile should we choose? Should we choose ceramic or porcelain tile or a different version of updated laminate? Should we make a pattern with the tile? Were we choosing the right tile? Should we go back to The Home Depot for the sixty-eighth time and look at it again just to be sure? Should we also go to Lowe's and Osh and three other flooring stores and see what they have as well, you know, just in case? Should we go with a gray floor instead of a brown floor? In the end, we randomly stopped by Home Depot one Sunday afternoon to look at lighting and saw tile on sale, BAM! It was done and bought. We can never resist a good sale. 
• Painted the walls a bright turquoise 
• Changed out the electrical switches 
• Installed new open cabinets
• Replaced the light fixtures and hung hooks 
• Painted and installed new baseboards 

I should clarify, by the way, that when I say "we" - particularly the items above that start with "ripped out or installed or painted" - that I really mean J did it. I helped, of course, mostly by keeping the girls out of his hair, providing cold beer at the end of the day and most importantly, moral support. 

Anyways, I'd say we're pretty much finished - I want to hang something on the walls, and we want to install a rod to hang clothes from and we're debating if we want to build a countertop on top of the washer and dryer. This project wasn't the piece of cake that we originally envisioned and required plenty of cold beer on hand and a handful of new power tools, but man I sure do love walking into my brightly lit, pretty colored laundry room each morning.