To follow along with more participants in the Fall 2021 Challenge, take a visit to the ORC Blog.
This week’s work in the laundry room was a pretty big leap! When I was doing the initial designs for this room, I felt like painting the cabinets was going to be one of the biggest impacts we could make in this small room. My husband has painted a lot before but I’ve never painted cabinets, so I’m glad he trusted my design decision on this call. I’m also really glad he pitched in with the painting, it was a huge help.
The color we picked after looking at our Samplize samples in the room for a while was Mauve Desert by Benjamin Moore, and we’re using their ADVANCE line of paint in Semi-Gloss. It has been a dream to work with so far.
The drop cloth came out, making this our cat’s favorite room in the house. Here you can see the Mauve Desert as the left sample in the picture, and I love the calm bright feeling it brings in!
Next, we removed the doors. While we rolled the paint onto the cabinet frames, the cabinet doors will be making a trip to our paint tent in the garage soon to get painted with the paint sprayer.
When taking everything out of the cabinets to tape, I started to think that maybe doing the cabinet organization this week rather than later would be better. I was thinking organization would be one of the last steps, but having the doors off made moving things around in here so much easier!
Because these cabinets go wall-to-wall, taping was actually a pretty quick process. If you look closely at the top of the cabinets with the molding, you can see that the tape is just slipped between the wall and the molding. While that made it really easy to tape, I am pretty sure I am going to want to caulk the molding there. Where the cabinet meets the wall is caulked already, so the missing area just feels kind of unfinished.
The last step we did before starting to paint was to sand the cabinets and then wipe off all the dust. So far the finish feels really solid, even with the fairly easy prep.
This picture is before the first coat completely finished drying, but the transformation makes me so happy even here! We actually ended up only doing one coat, even with the relatively light mauve paint over the dark wood. Overall the paint was easy to apply and covered well. First we brushed paint into the more detailed areas like the molding. Then, we rolled paint onto the flat parts of the face frame, making sure to do a pass over the detailed areas as well to get a uniform texture.
I just can’t wait to see it with the painted doors and new hardware now! But that will be work for another week.
I mentioned tackling organization a bit earlier. After measuring my cabinet depth and shelf height, and going through the shelves to figure out what was staying in these cabinets, I put in an order with The Container Store. These are from one of the sets put together by The Home Edit – side note, anyone else watch and love that show? I get so much joy from seeing organized spaces.
I picked these Sand wood organizers for a couple of reasons. I wanted something that would hide the contents, and I really appreciated that the Paulownia wood is a sustainable option. Everything that is going to go back into the cabinet fits neatly now, and there’s even an extra empty bin for room to grow. We’ll probably leave the labels off for a little bit until we have a chance to use the laundry room with this new setup and see if anything needs to move, but it’s already so much calmer in here.
Thank you for reading!
The Jeweled Nest 