So – it’s time for another guest post by the lovely Debra. To start us off, here is a shot of her a couple of years ago in Old Town San Juan:

Since I can’t help myself, my comments will be in italics. Here goes:

Let’s talk about laundry rooms. When we were looking for a new house, we went into so many that had a laundry closet or laundry in the garage or other totally unsatisfactory arrangements. I like a laundry roooom. Not being particularly tidy (speak for yourself, my dear), it’s nice to have a space where the door can be closed and the chaos contained (somewhat). At the SoMoToHo, we had a small laundry room, and it was also the pass through entry from the garage. It was the exact width of the washer/dryer and there was not much room for anything else except in the cabinets that went up to the ceiling and required that I stand on the washer to reach. All of those ceilings were 10′. Not horrible, but not ideal and it never got any decorating love until days before the house listed.

Immediately after selling, I started pinning laundry rooms:

At Hildring House the laundry situation was not good, the machines were just stuck in a hallway that was also the entry from the garage and there was only about 2 feet of walk space in front of the machines.

But with five bedrooms, I knew that situation was easily resolvable…… as long as you consider jack-hammering miles of foundation and digging out for new plumbing lines “easy.” Remember the problems we encountered in that endeavor?

Using that bedroom for laundry and powder room also allowed us to widen a hallway that really drove me crazy – but we will talk about that in another post. Here are the drawings for the new space:

See those lovely cabinets? (She’s talking about the ones shown of the left-hand side of the drawing on the right.) I tweaked them several times, including once after the doors were made- it’s a good thing Shawn loves me. I’m so excited to have all of that storage space- the middle tall cabinet (which is on the right in the drawing – that’s one of the changes that she made) will be for ironing board storage. At SoMoToHo we had one of those ironing boards that drop out of a wall cabinet and I never found it particularly easy to use – in my laundry dreams, I would have a sheet mangle (and someone else would actually use it to iron my sheets). But for the foreseeable future, I will have wrinkled sheets. Another of my requirements was a window- it is my opinion that every room with an outside wall should have at least one window- and I’m happy that we were able to add one to this room – another thing that was lacking in our last house.

Since the laundry room is smallish, we could afford to splash out a bit on tile- I knew I wanted a patterned tile, and here’s the one I first fell in love with 

I had been thinking I wanted some color, but this one was so cool, that I decided to go with it- until I saw the shipping cost, which was more than the cost of the tile- yikes! We visited a few tile shops and saw some other patterned tiles, still mostly in the black & white range, until we stumbled into The Tile Shop. We loved this place! SO many pretty tiles and great displays and the staff were all so helpful. We fell in love with this tile:

And then we decided that it would be really cool (or we hope it will be!) to paint the cabinets the bluish color in the tile. After painting out half a dozen blue sample boards we found we really liked:

This is Benjamin Moore New Providence Navy.

Then a trip to Anthropologie for hardware I love me some Anthropologie, and these knobs also have a great ‘hand’ feel. I am very tactile (indeed – it can be a real problem in museums) and I love the way good hardware feels in the hand.

This will probably be the first room finished, so I hope to have some before-and-afters for you in the next few weeks. We are moving in 10 days, which looks impossible at the moment. Makes my chest tight just thinking about it. But it’ll be fine, right? Om. There’s about a foot of drywall dust on every single surface in the house and we can’t even stay in there for more than a few moments before we are both sneezing our heads off! But I have faith in Shawn- movers are scheduled, notice has been given on our darling rental cottage. Ready or not…….

Stay tuned to see how that works out!

Thanks so much for reading and coming along With the Barretts on this adventure!