Avoiding Laundry Duty

It's Sunday evening, and my husband has disappeared into the abyss known as "Men's Poker Night."  I am sitting here with my toddler, watching Max & Ruby on Noggin.  (I know that doesn't ring a bell with some of you, I am sorry!)  I should be doing laundry, or something equally productive, but instead I decided to blog about laundry, or, really, my laundry room.  Why not? 

First of all, I should say that even having a laundry room is something of a luxury for me.  Our old house (in Ohio, where I am from and where Brent and I met and married) was built in the 1920s and therefore didn't have anything as sexy as a laundry room in the original floorplan.  Instead, we hauled ourselves down our rickety basement steps to the cockroach-infested bowels of our house and...I am having flashbacks.  Let's move on.

So here we are in Colorado and we have a laundry room.  On the main floor of the house!  With a light that doesn't require a dangling string to turn on!  And NO cockroaches!  So what did I decide to do with it?  Paint it, of course!  This is a whole new decorating opportunity for me! Think of all the fun laundry-themed little goodies I can buy!  Above and below, you can see my very favorite of these goodies:

The laundry sign above my cabinets was so fun to come up with.  I had seen things like it in the Ballard Designs catalogue but knew I could do it myself for less.  So I started with buying the letters, but if you look closely you can see that the "N" is a different font than the others.  That's because JoAnn's didn't have any more N's and I was too impatient to wait for the letters to be re-stocked!  So I bought another font for the N and I actually really like the way it turned out...adds a little unexpected sassiness!  My husband screwed the letters to a piece of scrap lumber, and then I painted the whole thing black.  Voila!

These adorable jars are a new addition.  I found the smaller one on sale at Hobby Lobby, and the bigger one just a few days later at Target.  Same brand and everything!  As you can see, laundry has not been as high a priority as decorating, because I am out of detergent and have not gone out to buy more for the larger jar.  The smaller one holds Oxyclean, which we use every day around here for toddler-induced stains!

The other half of the laundry room that you can't see (because I am having photo trouble at the moment) has been turned into the pantry.  I would LOVE to have a separate pantry (a nice big butler's pantry...oh, someday!), but in the meantime, a large baker's rack-style shelf works well. 

So there you go!  Thanks for distracting me from laundry for a little while!