Saturday, December 26, 2009

Wash and Dare

Like many people, I've never had a proper laundry room. In our previous home (of 15 years) the washer, dryer and laundry sink were in our unfinished basement. The floor was concrete, the walls were concrete blocks, and the overhead light fixture was an industrial-type fluorescent number.

Over the years I've thought about what it would be like to have a proper laundry room (or at least an attractive laundry "zone"). Photos like these helped fuel the fantasy.

When we purchased our current home we knew that we would need to move the existing laundry area (at the bottom of the stairs) in order to create our basement family/media room. In doing so, we could create a new and attractive laundry zone. The new laundry zone would have to be accessed through the utility room, but we planned to drywall the space (walls and ceilings), improve the lighting, replace the window, add doors in front of the "mechanicals" and use cork-look vinyl flooring to pretty-it-up. It also meant that the dryer could be vented properly, and a laundry sink could be added.

Now here's the daring part (which I alluded to in the title of this post) -- we decided to paint the walls a vibrant turquoise colour. That's pretty unusual for us, as we're fairly traditional and it's not exactly an historical colour in keeping with the age of the house. But, it's the laundry room after all, and making it a cheerful space was Job 1.

So we selected Benjamin Moore's Ash Blue and crossed our fingers and dipped and brushed... though why they called it Ash Blue (which implies some kind of graying-down of the colour), I'll never know!

http://www.benjaminmooreonline.com/review/product/list/id/1006/







A work in progress



Now it's functional. I'll post again once I've figured out how to hide the dryer venting (a fabric sleeve perhaps?), installed some kind of overhead light fixture, and generally prettied-it-up.

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