The Most Interesting Room in the World…Seriously

I have a friend in Virginia who painted her laundry room a bright orange color that she loves in order to inspire her to keep up with the most thankless household chore.  This is our 29th house in our almost 34 years of marriage.  I have had laundry rooms that were windowless, located behind bi-fold doors in a hallway, in a dark and cold basement, and even out in a detached garage space.  I have had to go upstairs, downstairs, and outside to wash clothes.  When we lived in an apartment right after we got married, I even got to go to a laundromat located inside the complex.

I guess that the bottom line about laundry is that so long as it gets done, who cares?  Well, I do.  I like being in beautiful spaces because I don’t see any reason why things have to be ugly.  I also love it when spaces work for me.  You know…enough storage, enough space.  I don’t mind working like a crazy woman, but can I at least have the tools I need and the space to accomplish what I need to get done?

And I suppose, I need to admit that Jerry and I aren’t afraid to be a bit different.  Here is what we came up with for the space that will serve as our 1. wine making room, our 2. laundry room, our 3. wine storage space, and 4. the area where I will keep my cookbooks and do crafty sort of things.

It was a tall order.  Add to all of this, if you come in our back door, you will pass through this space on the way.  It can’t look like a junk room.  Oh.  My.  Goodness.  What have we done?

Now We Are Furniture Builders…

We had been using an Ikea bookcase left over from one of the boys for our wine storage.  You probably saw a photo of it in the Weekend Wine Room Remodel post.  It was a great idea, it worked well.  We were ready for something else.  Jerry spent time with the graph paper.  I spent time pulling ideas from the Internet.  Houzz.com is a great place to get ideas.  You can create idea books for each of your rooms and stick pictures in them.  You can sort by rooms and also by style.  I tend to lean towards farmhouse and industrial.  There aren’t a lot of farmhouse wine storage ideas out there.  The industrial stuff was too, well…industrial.

And so I started just looking at farmhouse hutches to see what we could modify to fit our needs and our building skills.  Here is what we came up with…

How Did We Get Here?

Basically, you need to build boxes.

And then Jerry started showing off a bit.  We love the look created by the diagonal boards in wine cabinets.  Jerry notched the boards so they fit together and once they were in place, the entire cabinet became super sturdy.

For both hutches, we used up some more of the old tongue and groove flooring we had left over.  We nailed the flooring into the cabinet using a nail gun and it created a very cute shiplap back.

We had to decide how we were going to finished the pieces.  Our kitchen is the black and natural stain colors and we opted to continue this in the laundry/wine/wine storage/craft room.

The black stain was really black and so I hit the stained wood with the sander to make the grain pop a bit.  It looks fantastic!  We are very happy to have this project completed as there are 18 gallons of wine on the island in the kitchen.  We will be bottling that (about 90 bottles) in a few weeks and Momma is thrilled that those bottles have a home now.

Cheers!