One Room Challenge – Week One

I am so excited and a little nervous to be a first-time guest of the One Room Challenge.

The One Room Challenge is currently in its 15th season. It is not a competition. Rather, it is an enthusiastic and supportive forum for designers while they transform a room over a 6-week period. As a guest, I will be participating and providing an update on the progress on my chosen room each week. The internet will be flooded with the in-progress designs of many creatives during this challenge. Follow along! It’s a great thing to do while waiting for spring.

I want to thank my designer friend @Ashleyizsak who reached out to me with the idea of participating. I was in the airport on my way back from Mexico. During the plane ride I mulled it over and chatted about it with @GerainttheWelsh who is always my technical support. I had to pick a room pretty quickly, so here it is.

Room Choice

I chose one of the hardest working rooms in any house – the laundry room. Our laundry room was part of a renovation done by a previous owner. It was built into the attic. It has no window and a sloped roof. It’s dark and small with a few technical issues. My goal is to make it a better space to spend time.

Location, Location, Location

The location is probably the only good point about this laundry room. The entrance is on our second floor, adjacent to the bedrooms. I have lived in houses with a basement laundry, a main floor laundry and now on a second floor laundry. This is the best location for a laundry room, in my opinion. It’s easier to carry kitchen laundry up and down than it is to do the same for the rest of the household laundry.

Another benefit to having laundry upstairs, is that it is out of the main traffic area. With kids and a husband doing laundry it can get a bit messy in there. But it doesn’t bother me so much when it’s out of sight on the second floor.

How to Manage a Sloped Ceiling

As I mentioned, the laundry room was formerly part of the attic, so it has an extremely sloped ceiling. I can actually only stand upright for about 4 feet of the total 8 1/2 foot depth of the room. For this reason good space planning is important.

Folding Area

One of things we will want to gain with this transformation is useable folding area. I have aways folded laundry on the bed. But, now we have a puppy that sheds and naps on our bed. I just end up getting more hair on clothes if I fold things there.

Exposed Plumbing and Electrical

Something that has really bothered me since we moved is the exposed water shut off and electrical that is visible above the washer and drier. I have in mind, a creative way to hide those and gain actual useable space.

Lighting

Something that I want to find a solution for is the terrible lighting in this room. Because of the sloped ceiling there are few places to place light. As it is now, the light is on the entry wall. The light is behind me when I iron clothes and creates a shadow. It is hard to see the elusive dog hair I am ironing in place.

Uninspiring Floors

We have orange-coloured laminate flooring in the laundry room. There is nothing wrong with it but I really don’t like it.

I need to put my thinking cap on and figure out how I will improve the inadequacies of this room and make it a much more functional and beautiful place to do laundry.

Please follow along as I work to complete the one room challenge.

Always

Leslie