This Laundry Room Makeover Has the Most Brilliant, Budget-Savvy Dupe for Marble Countertops
It’s true that laundry rooms aren’t necessarily known for being massive, but the one in Melissa Meares’ (@melissaashleymeares) house had an especially tricky narrow setup; it’s 8×5 feet.
“The layout of the laundry room is very awkward with the water heater in the middle,” Melissa adds. She and her husband, Kyle, hid the water heater in the back corner and gave the wire shelves in the room a glow-up by adding cabinetry. They gave the “blank white box” — as Melissa puts it — a new color scheme, too.
The walls and floors got a paint makeover.
Melissa and Kyle added shiplap paneling plus a chair rail with wooden pegs to the walls, and they painted the lower half of the laundry room walls — plus the ceiling and the trim — light blue (Behr’s Perfect Landing).
They also painted the floors in the room. “Instead of redoing the tile, we decided to just paint it using the Rust-Oleum floor coat,” Melissa says. “We’ve used it throughout our house with great success!” The couple used a black base coat and a matte top coat.
Using peel-and-stick wallpaper was a DIY “first.”
On the upper half of the walls, there’s a statement-making blue peel-and-stick wallpaper from Rifle Paper Co. “I definitely learned a few things since then on ways to do it easier,” Melissa says.
And her design advice when it comes to picking paint and wallpaper is “slow and steady wins the race — and saves you money in the long run.” Sometimes you need to test wallpaper and paint on the wall (and together) before firmly locking in your decision and placing your larger order.
Cabinets add storage to the 40-square-foot room.
The true DIY tour de force in the room makeover is the new cabinetry. “I was a little leery of the cabinet installation, but it ended up being quite straightforward!” Melissa says, adding that the hardest part is keeping everything level and adding shims until it is. “Once it’s level, just a few screws and you’re done!” she says.
Another hard part of this project in particular was that when Melissa and Kyle were removing the wire shelves, they found termite damage and a leaking pipe in their walls, so they had to do some demo and repair before the aesthetic part of the project began.
“If we had had the time and budget, I would have added a tankless water heater,” Melissa adds. “We originally got a quote to replace it to the tune of $4,000, and it was not till after we did this makeover that we discovered that we could have done it ourselves for a few hundred.”
The countertops were budget-friendly.
One budget-friendly moment worth celebrating, though, is the countertops. “We wanted to do a marble countertop, and we used shower curb as a more budget-friendly option,” Melissa says. She and Kyle rented a wet saw to cut it down to size, and voilà, marble countertops!
“Doing this project, I learned the importance of small details in making a big impact,” Melissa says, noting some of her other favorite details like the cabinet pulls, new doorknob, and the new light fixture.
From the hardware to the wallpaper, the changes big and small come together to create a beautiful blue “after.”
Inspired? Submit your own project here.