While kitchens are often the warm, snug, heart of a home and the humble bathroom has become our private spa, laundry rooms have tended to remain purely functional and not necessarily very well-loved places. It doesn’t have to be like that, though. Laundry might never be your idea of a good time, but you can make it more fun (or less bad) with a well-decorated and well-thought out laundry room. Here are 7 tips to decorate the laundry room which is both functional and attractive.
Use barn doors to reduce noise while saving space
Barn doors or sliding doors can be fitted into many spaces because they don’t need to swing open and closed. From a practical perspective, they help to reduce the noise of doing laundry. From a decorative perspective, they provide an extra surface with which you can have some fun.
For example, you could give them a coating of chalk-board paint, which gives grown-ups a message board and children a place to draw. If your budget is too tight for this, or you really can’t fit them in, then consider using a curtain, which won’t be quite as good but can be a lot better than nothing, plus you can sew pockets in it for extra storage. If you can’t work out how to fit a curtain rod into your space, then see if you can use a tension rod.
Make the most of your floor
Laundry room floors need to be robust and durable, but that doesn’t mean they need to be boring. Use something sensible as a base, such as vinyl or tiles, and then put something easily washable on top of that for interest.
Obviously, the laundry room is not the place for your finest antique Persian rugs, but these days there are plenty of hard-wearing, washable rugs available at very affordable prices.
Have at least some bright, bold color
Most laundry appliances are white, a few come in silver or black. There’s a very good reason for this, good-quality appliances are expected to last for years and to fit in with all kinds of home décor changes. At the same time, if everything in a space is white (or silver or black); it can wind up looking cold, clinical and basically very uninviting. Because of this, the laundry room is one room where you usually want to make a point of using at least some bright, bold color where you can.
Use adhesive “tiles” for affordable and simple updates
Real tiling is expensive and usually unnecessary in a laundry room, unless you actually have a laundry sink. Even if you do, then you can save yourself money and increase your options for making changes later, by using plain white tiling behind the sink and putting the adhesive tiles over it.
Give preference to open storage
Unless you have a really big laundry room, open storage is the way to go because it eliminates the need to allow space for cabinet doors to open and close. Even if you do have a larger laundry space, open storage is generally still the best option.
Basically, in a laundry room it’s usually fairly easy to hide unsightly items in attractive containers, which takes away the main advantage of closed storage. The big advantages of open storage, however, still remain, namely that it keeps items easy to hand and that you can make the shelves do double duty for storage and decoration. Also, open storage will allow you to see the wall behind the shelves, which can be useful for adding color.
Mix and match your storage pieces to create interest
Pinterest is full of pictures of laundry rooms where everything matches perfectly with everything else and white appliances sit below white countertops with white cabinets and/or white open shelves filled with white storage baskets.
These can make for great, styled photographs, but it’s a look which isn’t likely to work well in real life for most people, particularly not people with children and/or pets. On the other hand, randomly picking storage and décor items can quickly make a space look fussy and cluttered and hence somewhere you don’t want to be.
The solution here is to pick a theme and run with that, it doesn’t matter what it is as long as it’s consistent. For example, you could have different colors and shapes of wicker baskets, as long as they’re unified by a common material or you could choose one or two colors and ring in the changes with different textures.
Create a small “pamper station”
Depending on the space available, this can be anything from a small jar to a standard tray. The key point it that it’s a place to hold little treats for yourself to make doing laundry more appealing.
Keep small glass jars for loose change found in the laundry, sweets, hand cream, oil diffuser etc. Add a plant or faux flowers to the tray. You can also include a tray with all your base materials and tools for removing those hard to remove stains.
