$100 Room Challenge Week 3- DIY Laundry Shelf

Alright guys, welcome to week 3 of the $100 Room Challenge!! This week I’m giving you a sneak peak of our washer and dryer situation and showing you how we made a shelf to cover all of the pipes and hoses behind them. If you follow along on Instagram, I’m sure you’ve been laughing along with us as we figure this room out!!

What I love most about the shelf we built is that it can be lifted off in a moment to access the water lines and everything else behind the dryer.  It was a SUPER simple DIY and it cost us $12 in wood to build.

I’ll be honest, I was expecting to be able to make this out of scrap wood for free, but we didn’t have quite enough in a board that would have worked.  I had to trade this for the rug I wanted to buy to put in front of the washer and dryer, but ultimately, I feel like the shelf was the better choice.  Are you ready to see what it looked like before we installed the shelf!?

This is the sight that greeted us right when we walked into the bathroom.  Yeesh.  It was stressing me out, but just LOOK at what we see now! And I CANNOT get over that gold hardware!! You won’t even believe how dirt cheap it was, but it looks and feels high quality!!

So much better, right?!  And it is seriously the world’s easiest project to complete!  All you need to do is measure the distance from your wall to your washer and dryer.  Ours ended up being a 1 foot gap, so we picked up a 1×12 board in a 1o ft length at our local hardware store.  We even “splurged” for the higher quality board that cost us a grand total of $12!!

Then, just measure and cut to the appropriate length.

Our shelf is kind of sneaky, because if you look at the side of the shelf where my husband is standing, we actually only attached a 1 foot side to it.  This is because we wanted it to be able to pull aside easily to access all of the hoses and pipes behind the washer and dryer.  We added an old shelf brace (you can see it if you look at the “before” photo) to support it. If the far side had gone all the way down, it would have been trapped around our washer and dryer.  Also, by doing it this way, we only had to buy one piece of lumber 😉

Not too shabby for $12, right? We stained the shelf in Minwax Special Walnut, which we had on hand.  This is my favorite shade of stain ever, and pretty much everything in my house is stained this color!

Another project we worked on this week was my subway tile backsplash under the gray cabinets.  And it only cost $35.  How is this possible?

Wallpaper!!!! Guys, I’ll be honest.  The room was coming together, but I was starting to worry that it wasn’t going to be as great as it was in my head.  Then we put this Devine Colors peel and stick wallpaper up, and BOOM.  Totally brought the whole space together.

I was a little worried that using wallpaper to simulate tile might look a little, well, fake.  But this stuff is actually textured and they did an excellent job of shading in the “grout” to look like like it had depth.

I got this puppy at Target.  Again, I was a little hesitant: what if it doesn’t actually re-position (it does!) or what if I can’t get the air bubbles out (I could!) and what if it’s a huge waste of money (it wasn’t!!)!

The only thing: You will DEFINITELY need two people to install it.  My mom and I were able to do it relatively easily together, but holy cow.  Trying to do it myself would have ended in a huge disaster.

Thanks for helping, mom!! PS: The directions say to use a squeegee to smooth out air bubbles, but we found that a hard cover Eric Carle book works perfectly 😉

I’m gonna be honest, guys.  This project has come together like a dream and is pretty much done! When does that ever happen?!  I just need to finish installing the hardware and style it and we’ll be completely done!  So here’s the rundown of my to-do list:

• Paint walls white-DONE!
• Paint cabinets gray-DONE!
• Center washer and dryer-DONE!
• Add cabinet hardware
• Add subway tile backsplash under cabinets-DONE!
• Make shelf to cover washer/dryer hoses-DONE!

Hardware–I’m comin’ for you this week!  Thank you so much for checking in and I can’t WAIT to see you guys next week for the big reveal!!!

Week 1 / Week 2 

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