{pretty, happy, funny & real}
I don't know if there's anything more in the spirit of this linkup than a mediocre laundry room renovation. Sometimes you need to have a little imagination to see the beauty around you, or maybe just a lower threshold for what you consider beautiful.
The renovation started with this little beauty that I spotted on the side of the (very busy) road. I've been wanting a new deep sink for our sad laundry room ever since we moved in, but since we are renting I obviously didn't want to go out and buy a new deep sink. I've just been making do with the sad one--putting a bucket into the sink and then putting the things I needed to clean into the bucket since cleaning things in a gross dirty sink seemed counter productive. Well no more! When I spotted my precious, I pulled over, checked it for cracks, and claimed it for my own--stuffing it into the front passenger seat of my van.
Well in order to install the sink we had to pull out the washer and dryer and if we were already pulling all of that out anyway we might as well paint, right? Right.
The Before
This might be the complete opposite of pretty. Most of our basement was this yellow color when we moved in and we've since painted everything but this laundry alcove which is located in the basement in one of our two bathrooms. There are usually doors that close it off to hide its unsightliness from guests.
As you can see it's very fancy cinder block with I'm not sure what splotched all over it--or is that stuff coming from underneath the yellow? It's hard to say. Well, about the same time I found the sink, the support for the shelf over the washer and dryer detached itself from the wall. Clearly it was a sign to get to work.
Chris, dutiful husband that he is, pulled everything out, scrubbed it all down and primed. I took over the next day painting and trimming everything while he was at work so that I could have my laundry room back. I can't function more than a couple of days without doing laundry. The laundry mountain can get scary.
You know what's not fun? Dabbing paint into cinder blocks to make sure you covered all the crevices. It was worth it though.
The After
I don't know if I would be so bold as to call this pretty but it's certainly an improvement and definitely clean. Not too shabby for some elbow grease and paint. I painted the shelf and the supports white and since the shelf is a little warped, we flipped it over so it could eventually bend back the other way. Hopefully.
I'd still like to hang my drying line inside the little alcove so I don't have to drape my diaper covers over random things in the bathroom to dry. And it would be nice to find some kind of wall mounted container for found objects/mostly legos. And I need to hang the doors back up, but since I painted the trim we now need to paint the doors as well or they'll look super dingy. It's funny how one project tends to spur so many, many more. Well, not funny to my husband :)
And, since I was already standing in the shower attempting to photograph this tiny space I thought I'd go ahead and show you the whole bathroom in all it's glory.
I know, it's pretty exciting.
What I'd really like to find is a circular braided rug for the floor. It's an awkward space and the rectangular rug looks off no matter how to lay it. Plus someone's always got cold toes since it can't cover the toilet, shower and sink all at once--hence the late spring space heater.
I know it might seem silly to put so much work into a rental home, but since we are military and haven't managed to stay anywhere longer than three years in the past decade we've come to the conclusion that there's no point in waiting for some undetermined future home to make things pretty. This is our life now and this is our home, so we may as well make it as nice as we are able.
David especially will spend his entire childhood bouncing from one duty station to the next. I don't want all of his memories to be of us living in ugliness. Really I think we're setting a good example for him, attempting to create beauty (or at least, less ugliness) and always leaving things a little better than they were wherever we go.
After all,
"...for the Christian who is consciously in communication with the Creator, surely his home should reflect something of the artistry, the beauty and order of the One whom he is representing, and in whose image he has been made!"
~Edith Schaeffer, The Hidden Art of Homemaking
What are your thoughts?
And as always, make sure to pop over to Like Mother, Like Daughter for even more captured contentment.
