Our laundry room is the room in our home we have paid the very least attention to. And it has SO much potential.

I've decided to put that potential on notice and force the design issue by signing up as a guest participant of this year's One Room Challenge.

If you're not familiar with the ORC, it's a twice yearly challenge in which 20ish bloggers transform a room in about six weeks. Anyone can participate in the challenge and link up to the site, and I've decided I should be one of those anyones!

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However, to get this done, I need Super Husband to step up. And to say Super Husband was not pleased at being coerced into revamping the laundry room is an understatement. My bad.

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But I had an idea... what if we take the garage fridge and put it into the laundry room. Say whaaaaattt? Beer in the house instead of the garage? He got right on board. Well... "right on board" may be an exaggeration. He got on board but waffled a bit over the last week and I've had to scramble to prove to him this is a great idea.

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And so it begins! I'm calling this room The Blooming Laundry Room because I'll be adding one of my flowery wallpapers to make this room sing a bit. Nothing is complete in my life without flowers. That is just the bottom line.

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This room is very large. By far the largest laundry room we've ever had. But there's just so much wasted space.

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Here is the room in all of it's ugly glory:

There's a planning desk in there which is behind a door when it's open. And if the door is closed there is zero natural light. I don't think anyone has ever sat at that desk. I can't see why you'd want to. Therefore that is being turned into a bank of cabinets instead.

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To remedy the natural light situation, I'd like to add two to three sunlight tubes. These appear as lights during the daytime. I love them. We have a few in a hallway, and need more there too. I'd also like one in the powder room which is another story for another day.

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My first thought is to do IKEA bases, and Super Husband can make the door fronts. He likes doing that stuff, but I don't want him to have to create all the boxes or we will never get done. We will go check it all out this weekend and see what our options are.

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In the meantime, I created this layout using the IKEA planning tool. I like the planning tool a lot. It was pretty easy to use, but for some reason it wasn't working in Safari very well, so I switched to Chrome.

There was not a laundry room planning option, but I made it work the open uppers are for open shelves, and the open space is for the washer/dryer.

I'd like all the walls to get this wallpaper which is one of my designs for Wallternatives. 

We plan on stacking the washer and dryer to make more space in the room. Super Husband will be building a structure to go around them.

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A few of the materials we plan on using:

Well, until next week when I'll update you on our progress.

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For now, I gotta go empty the space to prove my determination to a certain gentleman.