Laundry Room Oak Cabinet Upgrade

Materials and the sequence of the job sit together on this page.

Elisa at Re-Designing Real Life updated her plain oak cabinets with a nice coat of paint! Doesn’t paint make almost anything better?


Here is the Before shot.




Here is the before pictures. When we had our cookie cutter house built, we had them install cabinets in the laundry room, but went with the basic, direct, oak cabinets that are in every other house. One of the things on my to do list, is to change all the cabinets, but instead of buying new ones (that is SOO not in the modest-cost), I want to redo them all. So, I started with the Laundry room. And I LOVE the outcome. First of all, the room is SMALL, basically only room for the washer and dryer. And it felt as small as it looked. And we were using every nook and cranny for storage in that room. It was really starting to bug me having the clutter up on top of the cabinets showing. So I used a tentsion rod, and some fabric out of my craft room to hide the junk up top. The fabric is actually a clearance shower curtain I found at Ross awhile ago for like$1.99 or something crazy like that. I also made a curtain to go on my folding table that used to be a bookshelf, to contain more items being stored in there. And I Love the bright color it adds. I have always been a fan of the color yellow. It is such a happy color, and when you are folding laundry, you need to have some happy reminders. I used some leftover blue paint from one of my friends projects (thanks Jess!), so that was free. The bookshelf turned folding table was given to me by my sister in law, so that was also free. The paint was used for another project, so you can say that was free to! I did have to purchase The soap jar (goodwill for $5), the polyurethane ($9) and the deglosser ($6). (More on painting cabinets soon) So the grand total for the makeover was around $22. Not bad, I think. And the room feels soo much bigger, and put to better use.

Here is the bookshelf turned folding table. The cute words are a gift from my mother (Thanks Mommy!) I added some command hooks to the side to dry items that shouldn’t go in the dryer. And these cool pictures, are real adds cut ouf of magazines when my grandmother was younger. When I inherited them, she had just made some cardboard frames for them. So to preserve them better, I had my other Grandpa build me some custom frames, because they were odd sizes. These may be my go-to part of the room, just because of the story they tell. The frames where painted black, but I decided they needed to be white to match, and I think I like them better!




  What a nice change in the space. I like the curtain    that hides necessary storage and the vintage art.   How do you like the changes?