Laundry Room Renovation: When One Project Becomes Two and a Half

Last time I posted about the laundry room, I mentioned that we had once again had to change our plan. This project has given us some serious issues from the start but as of right now, the newest floor plan we’ve come up with is a go!

This means that instead of one project, we actually have two and a half.

First, the former laundry room with garage access will transition to purely a laundry room with lots of storage. We’re still planning on removing the wall between the laundry room and the hall closet/built-in bench to open the space up and adding floor to ceiling cabinets.

Our new plan for the laundry area is to leave the washer and dryer side by side instead of stacking them. We want to build a platform for the machines to sit on that would have some storage capability or potentially house the litter box for our cats and we’ll add back some upper cabinets, too. Now that we won’t have the access to the garage in this space, we can frame that door in and put in floor to ceiling cabinets for plenty of storage (I’m thinking cleaning supplies, pet supplies, maybe some seasonal decor, etc).

The second project is transitioning the old cat closet to a new pantry!

Our plan here is to relocate the entry from the hallway to the dining room. I’d really love to use an antique door with a large glass pane here but I’m not sure I’ll be able to find one. Moving the door to the long side of the pantry will allow us to put in shelving across the back wall and around the short wall on the left. I’m trying to decide exactly what I want to do in here and whether I want open shelving around the whole space or if I want a mixture of shallow cabinets and open shelving. Not sure but I’m pretty sure this is where I’m going to put the orange grove mural I ordered from Society6.

We’ll be able to move a lot of our lesser used kitchen stuff in here (large serving dishes, pastry board, stand mixer, items we use when we host a party, etc). The best part is that this will open up the other hall closet for who knows what.

And in case you’re wondering, the dining room is project #2.5. Here’s a listing photo:

This room was marketed as a Florida room (which it 100% is not) but for us it makes the most sense as a dining room. We haven’t done much of anything in this room other than paint and change out the ceiling fan to a pendant light and I don’t plan on this becoming an entire makeover right now but since we’ll be adding two doors to the wall on the right (one to the pantry and one to the garage), I’m thinking of maybe adding some sort of wall treatment like faux board and batten across the room. I’m kind of thinking about using dark green in here but that also seems to have blown up across Instagram and design blogs so I’m hesitant (although that didn’t stop me and my love of navy so we’ll see).

We’re waiting on one quote to come through before we get started and I’m not sure what our schedule is looking like at the moment but I’m hoping we can finally start making some progress soon now that we have a floor plan that will actually work!