Laundry Room Reno With Birch Tree Shelves

We started the laundry room renovation in October 2014 and it took about three months to complete. It doesn’t look like it needed much work, but the vanity had a lot of water damage around the bottom so we knew we had to replace that. And then we replaced the almond coloured toilet to match the sink. We stacked the washer and dryer and made custom shelves out of birch trees and scrap wood we had lying around. We also replaced the light and the door, and painted the walls and trim. Here are the before pictures.

This is the laundry nook. We removed the cabinets and put them in the garage for extra storage. We decided to stack the washer and dryer because the doors opened away from each other and it was very awkward trying to get the laundry from the washer to the dryer. Also, the door to the bathroom always got in the way of the washer door, and it just didn’t work well.

I started this project on a bit of a whim. I was home alone with two kids while the oldest was at school, and I was a little bored. Tony came home that day to see a toilet on the front lawn.

Before putting all the fixtures back in the bathroom, I painted all the trim white with Benjamin Moore Simply White. I painted the walls using a mix of leftover paints I had – it turned out to be a light greige.

We stacked the washer and dryer and wanted to add a shelving unit beside them so there was lots of storage space. We also wanted to do something unique without spending too much money. So I went to our land and cut down a small birch tree for the front supports. Tony found some wood in the garage that we could use for the shelves. Then he did a burnt wood finish on the shelves using a blowtorch, and sealed it with a couple coats of polyurethane. I never took pictures while he was doing this, but it was pretty cool. And Tony never protested when I asked him to do it for me.

To build the shelving unit, we attached a brace to the wall and screwed it into studs. This piece holds up the back of the shelf. The front of each shelf is held up by a piece of the birch tree. You can see the finish that the blowtorch gives to the wood – it really brings out the wood grain and gives more contrast than staining would.

There’s a ton of storage on these shelves. We designed it so there was room for at least two laundry baskets, because there’s always a steady flow of laundry through this room.

The light is from Lowes and it cost about $100. I love the sparkle it brings to this room.

The vanity, mirror and faucet are from Home Depot. The vanity is the Glacier Bay Ashland 36 inch vanity. I think the amount of storage in this vanity is perfect for a half bath, and I like that there’s room for baskets underneath. The backsplash tile is also from Home Depot. We bought the mosaic tile as a black Friday sale, and somehow we didn’t end up with quite enough. So we got the turquoise tile and added a stripe of that in with the other tile. It was pretty finicky working with those little tiles in this pattern, but we’re happy with how it turned out.

I got this canvas print from Winners. The colours were perfect for the room, and I thought the trees tied in nicely with the shelves. However, it used to be a rectangle that was too big for the space. So I peeled the canvas back, cut the wood frame with a chopsaw, glued and clamped it back together, and stretched the canvas back over the smaller square frame.