Laundry Room Remodel- The Plan

This all started a few weeks ago when I started reorganizing the laundry room. I decided that if the top shelf was just a few inches higher, I could put laundry baskets on the lower shelves. Three of them to be specific, one for lights, one for darks, and one for linens. So it has all snowballed now into a complete laundry room remodel. Once it's done, it'll be our first finished room in the whole house! So exciting!
This is the before picture (sorry for the poor cell phone quality)-

It's messy, unorganized, and there isn't room on the shelves to put any laundry baskets, so I just end up putting them on the dryer and then it's in the way.






And this is my vision so far-

Presented in the lovely 3D model I whipped together in Google SketchUp. I'm a dork, I love 3D modeling. Gotta use that engineering degree, right? No dimensions yet. That's because we haven't decided on them yet. And lots of blank space on the space, because other than the baskets, I'm not sure what's going to go there yet.

Most of the differences are subtle. Like the shelves are going to be at different levels, even though they'll be the same wire shelving. I'll be changing the light fixture (it's just a plain 1980's/90's globe light), that's what the yellow cylinder represents. We already chose the wall color, it's close to what's displayed in the 3D, kind of a bluish-minty green. We're going to go with a beach & ocean feel for the laundry room. Most of that will be in the finishing decorating touches. The black rectangles are the laundry baskets I'll use to sort laundry, there's 3 of them, it's kind of hard to differentiate in the model.

One of the biggest projects we'll be tackling with this is tiling the floor. Right now, it's ugly yellowed vinyl flooring, yuck! After a quick brainstorming session of 'how can we make this better,' we decided that it's just going to be much better to go ahead and tile it. The space is only 3' x 5', so it'll hardly take any tiles, and it's just a square room, so not too much tile cutting to do. Once we rip up the vinyl flooring, we'll have to assess the condition of the plywood sub-floor and see if that needs to be replaced, then add some concrete board, then tile. Simple enough, right?? We'll see...

I think the room will be so much better, and it will be 'finished', as in we won't mess with it anymore and we can focus elsewhere. Plus, I can pretend that I like laundry, when I'm really just staring at how pretty the room is going to be!