Bringing Light to the Dungeon

Last weekend I decided I’d had enough of the creepy laundry room. Something needed to be done. So I figured that with an extra lamp and a piece of furniture to serve as a folding station, my laundry room could be much more enjoyable. Well, things turned out better than expected, and my laundry room project sparked a cleaning mood in both Tyler and me, which made the whole basement a more enjoyable, less cluttered space.

Remember the photos of the dark, dirty, spider-filled laundry area?

I shudder thinking back to the way things were. I can’t believe I ever spent time down there! Yikes. Well, the photos from this project are going to be even more shocking since I didn’t post photos of the first round of improvements (mainly doing something about that awful floor).

Back to the “beautify the laundry room” project of this weekend, I headed down there to take note of what I needed before we headed out to the store. I knew that buying a new piece of furniture to serve as a folding station (aka, countertop) would get expensive, so I brainstormed to think of alternative options (you know, since our basement is filled with junk and there had to be something there that could be repurposed). Lucky for me, we had purchased a shoe cabinet for upstairs that had since been moved downstairs due to redecorating/deciding I didn’t want shoes all over.

The shoe cabinet was currently serving as boot storage, but since it’s July, those have not been needed for quite some time. Tyler really doesn’t have my imagination. He did not look thrilled at the prospect of turning a small, narrow shoe cabinet into a folding station for my laundry room. But I had a vision, and all I needed was a thick piece of plywood.

(Note: Sorry, but I did not take step-by-step pictures, because my camera was at Tyler’s office.)

So we went out and bought a piece of plywood (it was either ½ inch or ¾ inches), which we then centered on the shoe cabinet and nailed in with a nail gun (Tyler’s new toy—it’s great). Of course I didn’t anticipate that the power of the nail gun would create pretty deep holes where the nails went in. I thought I should grab some wood putty and fill them in, but Tyler didn’t feel that was necessary, since he believes this is a temporary solution (haha, too bad I like the end result so much!).

So my next instinct was to cover the whole surface with fabric. And coincidentally, I had some extra fabric lying around from a table cloth I cut up. Also coincidentally, it fit perfectly! So I folded the ends under and used a staple gun to attach the fabric to the bottom of the surface all around. Quick and easy—my kind of project!

Now I have a good amount of room to fold clothes in the no-longer dungeon if I choose, plus we have storage for all of our laundry “accessories” (you know, like dryer sheets, detergent, etc.). So those things don’t have to sit here:

Yes, by “here” I mean all over the place. A nice, organized solution that turned out way better than I ever thought it would. Here are the after photos:

There were a few mishaps with the nail gun, but I am plotting ways to cover up the dangerous nails sticking out, because I'm thinking this thing's a keeper!

Here's a wide shot of the room, with some of those not-so-attractive basement things sneaking into the shot. Soon enough it will all be pretty down there.

And now the sink can actually be used to wash things. The whole sink will be painted as part of my "de-green the basement" project.