Conquered Closet: Wild Ink's Wonderful Laundry

Welcome back to Rebekah of Wild Ink Press. You might remember her aMAZing bathroom renovation from a while back (easily one of my favorites). She is back today to show us how she made over her laundry room into a simply charming spot.



Hello, Brooklyn Limestoners! When Stefanie mentioned on twitter last week that she was looking for a couple of guests posting before-and-afters, I thought right away of my newly refreshed laundry room, and she graciously accepted my suggestion. Thanks for having me back again, Stefanie.

Little did I know what I was getting into - that a laundry room might be the MOST difficult room in the entire house to photograph, unless you are either a magician or own your body-weight in professional photography gear!! I have neither, so you'll have to excuse the fact that you can never see all of the room at once. It's a pretty snug little space.

A bit of background: our home is a nice custom house built in the 1990's, and we love its location (by an organic flower farm, a block away from almond orchards, but still biking distance to downtown) in Chico, California. Plus it has great bones, and a fantastic letterpress studio in the back. But the overall interior? Builder beige, or as I like to say, builder blah. We've been slowly remodeling from top to bottom to make it ours, and the most recently I gave the laundry room a refresh on a small budget.

This is thoroughly shameful, but here's the before:



Yes, all that laundry and piles of junk are mine. I hate laundry. H-A-T-E. Part of the inspiration for the remodel was hoping that a beautiful space would make my obsessive nature want to keep it clean - and hence get the laundry done. Backward thinking, I know. The room had white walls, 12" beige tiles with brown grout, and one long flourescent tube light fixture. This is the other side of the room (just imagine me crouched against the washer to take this photo):



You get the idea. Pretty blah. I pinned to this board on Pinterest for inspiration and ideas, and then went to work!

Here's what I ended up with:



I was doing this refresh on a dime, so sadly, couldn't replace the tile floor with the beautiful penny tile I wanted to use. Instead, I covered most of the floor with a rug - the Andalusia Dhurrie from West Elm. I mixed my own shade of light grey paint from leftover cans we had (our house has over 15 shades of grey paint throughout).

The butcher block is from Ikea (unfinished oak), my husband Matt cut it down and installed it above the new washer/dryer as a beautiful and handy counter top. I decanted all of my laundry detergents - I love them so much better this way!! Easier to use and more lovely to look at:



On the wall I clothes-pinned vintage receipts (from etsy) onto a ribbon and attached it to the wall with a glue dot. I love looking at the little sundries people purchased back then:




I have a teeeny little dish (originally part of our sushi set) for things I find in pockets...



Mostly loose change, although the occasional dead bug works its way in too (my four year old loves to squash bugs, I'm working on it).

I reused all of our brass fixtures, spray painting them oil-rubbed bronze. This towel I bought on etsy, it was love at first sight:



Mr. Darcy, aauugh.

And it would be unfair if I didn't mention that one of the biggest inspirations of the new laundry room is the new washer and dryer. I've never had laundry appliances new before - this was big! I researched and got a screaming good deal at Sears (plus coupon plus a rebate), although I don't really recommend them because the entire process was a ton of hassle. Still, all's well that ends well:




That's pretty much it! It's great to have a clean laundry room in 2011!! If you want to get the scoop on cost-break-down and installation process (too boring for this before and after!) you can find it on my little blog here. Thanks again for letting me share, Stefanie!

Conquered Closet: Kara's Storage Wars Won

Welcome back Kara of Kara Paslay Designs whose talents seem to know no bounds - when she isn't merchandising some gorgeous display at Anthropologie, she is working with her husband on one fabulous DIY after the next (for example their her dining room and scrap wood busts?). If you have somehow not already devoured her blog, pencil that into your schedule because its so very worth it. So I knew she would have some clever storage solutions for those of us not so blessed with lots of closet space.



Hello! I'm Kara Paslay and that handsome fella in the photo below is my husband, Tim. We write the blog Kara Paslay Designs, and we are super excited to be here today!



I have to admit when Mrs. Limestone told me the topic of discussion for this series of guest posts, I was a little bit bummed. . . mainly because the couple of closets that I do have in my home are nothing special. They are somewhat organized, but definitely not worthy of a blog post. So I started to think about an issue that I'm guessing many of us have.

Living in an older cottage style house, our storage space is pretty limited. This style of house was built with small closets that are few and far between. Because of this, I have found ways to conceal a lot of my clutter necesseities. Today I am going to go over one of those ways, but you can pop over to my blog to see more storage ideas- both hidden and exposed! :)

Buying or building pieces of furniture that have lots of drawers provide you with instant organization! Below you can see the media console that my husband and I built with a bunch of old drawers we found at flea markets.

In order to build this piece, we gathered a bunch of mismatched drawers from a local flea market. Then Tim (my husband) built boxes for each drawer to fit in. We also bought a few metal files and a mirror for a special project!

After the individual drawer boxes were built, Tim built one large box to hold all the drawers. Here are a few pictures we took as we were trying to figure out exactly how things would fit together.

We designed the piece so that the overall feel was a structured and clean even though there is a lot going on. The whole project took a lot of planning, figuring, and refiguring but in the end we were happy with the result! :)

We not only love the look, but we love that each drawer or space is used to organize/hide a different thing, like this drawer which fits our DVD's perfectly.

And like this mirror that rotates to reveal our DVD player on movie night, but conceals it the rest of the time. You can watch this this video of us showing how it works on The Nate Berkus Show.

We also designed the piece to have an opening that perfectly fits a collection of our magazines.

One drawer is used to store all my design consulting materials: graph paper, current catalogs, paint fans, and more.

So that's our 1 stop shop for clutter concealing! We hope that you've enjoyed reading about it and might be inspired to built something similar for yourself!

Thanks so much to Stefanie for having me!

Conquered Closet: Chloe's Dress Up Cabinet

Welcome back Rambling Renovators. If you have read my blog for long, you know I am one of this blogs biggest fans (check out their beautiful bedroom and favorite nook to see why) . So naturally I had to ask them to share their own little (hint, hint) twist on a storage solution

Hello Brooklyn Limestone readers! I’m so excited Stefanie asked me to be a part of her master closet makeovers series. While my own master closet is in shambles with a wardrobe that needs to be edited, mismatched hangers, and stray shoes everywhere, my little 2.5 year old daughter Chloe has a closet that any adult would envy.

After tiring of seeing her costumes and play accessories all about, I was inspired by this pin to build a costume closet. I found an old 4-drawer dresser at the Salvation Army and tossed out all but one drawer. We sanded the dresser, added trim and a shelf, and painted it.



My girl loves anything yellow so I pasted some decorative paper on the inside and hung a yellow mirror on the outside.



With the addition of a hanging rod and some hooks, she now has the perfect place to corral all her tutus, costumes, superhero capes, jewellry, and princess shoes.

The bottom drawer holds smaller accessories like masks, gloves, purses – and of course kitty cat ears!



Now that Chloe has her costumes out on display, two surprising things have happened – she plays with her costumes more, and she likes keeping them neat and orderly! She’ll even ask me to put things back on hangers when playtime is over. Weird kid :) Maybe I should put pretty wallpaper in my closet and it’ll entice me to keep things neat.