Loads of fun: A Before and After Story

I'm a mom.  And a wife.  And a laundry expert.  Sort of.  I nicknamed myself the Laundry Queen because some days that's all I feel like I do.  And is it just my household that likes to fill up laundry baskets just as I am admiring how nice they look when they are all empty?  PB sometimes apologizes to me when he's the first one to throw in some dirty laundry.  He knows I love an empty laundry basket.  Since I feel like I am constantly doing laundry I wanted a pretty space to be in while doing my daily chore.  The laundry room in this home is also what I call my office.  I also call it my mudroom.  It's really a catch-all room.  When we bought this house last July I fell in love with the idea of how much space I was going to have to do all my laundry in.  However, it was as ugly-as-all-get-out!  You know how ugly that is!  Take a look at the before pictures of my favorite space:

What?  You don't like 1960's wood paneling?  Hmmm.  Me either!  I had to look past all the brown and cobwebs that covered this room and think of all the fun I would have in here while cleaning my beloved husband and children's clothing.  This is the first room you walk into from our carport.  It's pretty much the only door that people use when coming to visit us.  It has to look good.  So I began to redecorate this room the week after we moved in and boy what a different looking room it became.   We decided to remove a crazy room-dividing kitchen cabinet and put in this space.  It could use some extra storage.  PB orchestrated the cabinet switch-a-roo and got my parents and our teenage neighbor to come over to help out.

                                                                      Crazy room-dividing kitchen cabinet

                                                                    PB removing the crazy kitchen cabinet!

                                                                                     In it's new home!
 
I was doing back flips after I saw this thing hanging up in my freshly painted laundry room.  It looks right at home in here.  I knew immediately we made a good decision in putting more storage in here.  Plus, it hadn't cost us a dime!  Yeah!  So I broke out some more paint and started painting the cabinets.  Guess what color???? 

Black!  I love, love, love how they turned out!  I couldn't be happier with my new Laundry Room/Office/Mudroom!  I think it may be my favorite room-makeover of all time!  Also, I made a little area for the children to place their backpacks and lunch boxes in here.  It's very to similar to what we had in our last house but has a different feel to it in this house.  This is what makes up the mudroom part of the room.  I love how organized it makes me feel!
 

It's a great place to have so that the floor can stay clear of all their stuff that they come home with every day during the school year.  The two pictures above the hooks are the kids self portraits that they did in pre-school when they were 4 years old.  So special to me! 

I'd still like to get a rug to go in this space and I'm thinking about covering up the water heater with something to make it less of an eyesore.  I thinking about a curtain or some sort of a room-dividing screen could do the job in concealing it so it's not quite as noticeable.   We'll see what I come up with.  But as for today, I'm just having loads of fun doing my family's laundry!