Stenciling the laundry room

I am so incredibly grateful to have an indoor space to do laundry. I grew up doing laundry in my parent’s garage. When we bought our first house, our laundry was on the back patio. We hired a plumber so we could move the laundry unit to the garage. And you know how garages are, the floor would get filthy and we didn’t have a door from the inside of the house that went out into the garage attached to the laundry room, so we either had to go out the front or sliding back door to do laundry. I was done with those charades after 11 years.

When we walked through our current house in 2013 I was so happy to see the indoor laundry room. Honestly, it sold the house for me. I wasn’t excited about the galley kitchen, terrible yard and pool, windows, bathrooms or floors that needed to be redone. I knew how wonderful it would be to not have to go outside to do laundry. Heck yeah!

I recently thought I wanted to stencil a wall in our dining room, but I was a little nervous. I decided to try and stencil our laundry room to see if I liked it. I ordered a stencil and bought some gray paint. I tested gray and black paint and really liked how the black paint looked with the window, but I decided I needed to paint the walls a bright white to match the cabinet. I painted the walls and then started stenciling. I now want to paint all of our walls bright white. I didn’t think our walls were dark until I painted.

I don’t know how these crafty people do it because I think stenciling is hard and tedious. You have to tape the stencil to the wall, paint, let it dry and then start all over. I stenciled our kitchen at our previous house, but I just created a stencil out of a file folder and went for it.

It took me a few days to finish the stenciling. When I was all done I went back and tried to clean up the stars that bled through the stencil, but honestly, I just didn’t care that much at that point. I was tired of the paintbrushes and paint everywhere. I needed my laundry room back so I could keep working. I did enjoy cleaning behind the washer and dryer — holy wow — it was so dirty behind our machines!! I also loved purging the cabinets out and finding room for the garbage to live next to the machines. It is amazing how we collect cleaning products. Just keep what you use and stop purchasing “dreams” in a bottle.

I am glad I did it. I like how the laundry room turned out. I will not be stenciling anywhere else though, but I am going to slowly paint the rest of the house a brighter white. My favorite part of any project is putting all the stuff away and cleaning up. All done!