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How to Increase the Value of Your Home - Creating a Laundry Lady Cave!

By Edward Drennan

Real Estate Sales Representative with Century 21 Miller Real Estate Ltd. 4793863

July 02, 2017 12:02 PM

Creating an eye appealing, practical and space efficient laundry space helps increase the value and interest of your home, while helping to create a more enjoyable laundry experience!

Welcome back! This is the second in a series of design inspirations co-written with Livia Drennan, founder of Your Story by Design, Oakville, Ontario. This post describes how we created a modernized laundry space.

As the debate on the best place in a home for the laundry room continues, we would like to share our personal story to better illustrate the shift in laundry room design:

The average builder-grade home here in Ontario has the laundry room situated on the main floor, together with the mudroom. It is considered by most the ideal location, and for this project the laundry room used to be on the main floor, too. In my mind, a dream laundry room in a mudroom would look something like this:

That ideal, however, was not the case on this project:

What mudroom? No place to hang a coat, a pile of shoes on the floor, and a make shift counter.

These aged and inefficient appliances needed to be told bye-bye. Our dream involved a spacious and fresh-looking laundry room, as well as an elegant mudroom. Reality prevailed, however, and we soon realized that this was impossible to achieve in that amount of space.

The inspiration photos, as well as lottery homes and estate model homes we visited had large laundry rooms in the basement. And we thought… why not our home?

And now your invitation to the "After" in our basement. A Lady Cave, where Livia will share with you some tips to achieve a spacious and fresh-looking laundry room:

Tip #1 – Find a clear wall, or a corner in the basement to host whatever your heart desires in a laundry room. Once you know the measurements, you can start designing.

New Laundry Room in the Basement

Tip #2 – Make sure you allow for a spacious counter top, as big as possible – this was the first priority on our list. As was in my case, maybe some of you are tired of sorting and folding washed laundry on your dining table?

Tip #3 – Paint the walls in a light colour. Basement laundry rooms don’t have to be dark and dreary. If you have one like this, paint it in a light colour immediately; your desire to perform this chore will increase drastically :).

We used Sea Salt by Sherwin Williams here, it is such a lovely and calming blue-green. It is a great colour for a bathroom as well.

Tip #4 – Bring in lots of lighting: This was the second priority on my list, so we had installed enough lighting to bring to life the colour on the wall and work space areas.

Tip #5 – Have sufficient storage: A place for hanging shirts as soon as they come out of the dryer, a place for drying flat, pull-out baskets… In our case, this was up there with generous counter space. The room was built using IKEA ALGOT units, which you can mix and design to your needs. We had fun designing this space, and made sure there was storage for more than laundry objects. Oh, and don’t forget a place for the ironing board.

Tip #6 – Keep the cabinets, or the shelves and the counter white or a light colour, and inject one or two accent colours to make your heart skip with joy!

Tip #7 – Bring in some cute art and humour. Laundry can be fun, too.

Tip #8 – Use pretty baskets to organize and hide not-so-good-looking objects. When I found the basket below, I knew it had to come home with me – nothing wrong with some French injection… La Blanchisserie… doesn’t it sound sophisticated?

Tip #9 – Display pretty objects that have meaning to you. There is little natural light in the basement, and this pitcher holding dry lavender was the next best thing to natural flowers.

Doing laundry can really feel less of a chore! Smiling every time I enter that space, and it is a breeze to fold the laundry and put it away. I swear it takes less time, specially when you have some help ;-)