The Laundry Room

If there is one room of the house that I am guaranteed to spend time working in each weekend it is the laundry room. So from day one giving our new laundry room a make-over was high on my to do list.

I started out by using Kilz 2 over the murals previously painted on the walls. Then, I went to town with Behr Indoor Satin paint in a Valspar gray (Stratus 335-3). In general, we use flat paint on our walls but with the laundry room I went with satin because it enables the walls to be cleaned – good for laundry rooms, bathrooms, kid’s rooms and the kitchen. It only took one good coat with quite a bit of touch up by hand.

I also painted the trim using Bier Premium Plus Ultra (glossy) in a slightly off white (Popcorn W-B-200). Popcorn is the trim color we are using throughout the house. This particular Behr paint is a two in one paint - it primes and paints in one step – i.e. no roughing up the base boards with sand paper. I had to apply two coats to the trim but it was well worth it to skip the sanding step.

Picking out a shade of gray is difficult. Home Depot sells Behr paint samples in a flat finish for under $3. I highly recommend trying out your color with a sample first. My lesson learned however is that you need to paint a fairly large portion of the wall to really get a feel for the color. I still love the shade of gray that we ended up with however; it turned out slightly more blue than the smaller sample I painted.

On occasion Behr has mail-in rebates (1 gallon and 5 gallon) which make painting even more affordable. Also, if you chose a flat finish for your walls the sample you previously purchased is the perfect size to keep for touch ups!

Here are the before, during and after pictures. Our laundry room has very high ceilings and isn’t very well lit so I got a small lamp from Wal-Mart which also helped to soften the room. I also bought the decorative S at Wal-Mart. Everything else is either homemade or something I already had but wasn’t using in any other room. I love the way the gray walls make the white cabinets stand out!