Laundry Room: One Room Challenge Week 5

Hope you had a wonderful Memorial Day weekend! As the summer heats up, we’re thankful to spend some time indoors chipping away week 5 of the One Room Challenge. In week 4, we moved passed the drywall and into building our Ikea Pax unit.

If you came here from the ORC site, hello! I’m Sanju Patel. By day, I work behind a desk, typically crunching numbers. By night, you can find me in a garage. My wife and I purchased a home in Texas 2 years ago – a quick close without costly bells and whistles. As lifelong fans of DIY, we’ve decided to invest into our home as our family grows with an open invitation to see our process from start to finish.

Measure, Cut, Install

The Pax unit was temporarily moved into the laundry room for measurements. Be careful moving the unit without the backing; the large size is unwieldy. What worked for us: using furniture coasters and incrementally pushing along the bottom.

Measurements were taken across the top, middle, and bottom. 2 x 4’s were cut to size and attached to the wall stud using 2 1/2″ – 3″ screws. Next, measurements were taken at the depth of the unit and also attached to adjacent wall studs. Although Pax does arrive with 2 brackets (at the top), the additional 2 x 4’s around the frame and wall will help strengthen the unit while serving as spacer for the trim to eventually sit on.

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Finally, the unit was moved back out back to our hallway. The backing was attached using helpful nail holders supplied with the Pax hardware. Prior to moving the unit back into the laundry room, the base was installed and attached to studs along the base of the wall.

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Wall Treatment

If you’ve been following our posts, we intended to cover one of our walls with wallpaper, top to bottom. However, after adding the wallpaper to our cart, we backed out of doing a full wall – it was becoming cost prohibitive for this space. So, we decided to move forward with half-half wallpaper/tile option for a fraction of the price.

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Insert dad joke: this tile job was a lot of trowel and error. I know, I know…

Major props to Moses, a tile guru of over 20 years at our local Home Depot. He steered us in the right direction, helping to choose the most efficient pre-mixed acrylic adhesive and mortar for our tile size. For larger tiles, it’s recommended to use thin-set. Obviously, there are varied opinions on using acrylic vs. thin-set. For our space, we should be ok with applying directly to our drywall. Calling all saavy tilers, let us know what you think!

Recapping the Plan

Alrighty, so here’s an overview of what’s left for these two walls: don’t mind the faaancy scribble. To wall on the left, we’re still waiting for two 42″ cabinets to arrive. Below in purple, we’ll adhere additional white subway tiles. The large green line represents a shelf that we’ll be constructing from some rustic white oak that we scored last week. To the wall on the right, wallpaper will cover the top half and the bottom half has been just tiled out. We’ll be adding mortar over the week.

Scope Creep

We hardly thought about the lighting until all our pictures were “yellowing” out. Not that we intend to take Glamour Shots in our laundry room on a daily basis (ok maybe a couple of times), but we would like a more natural feel with brightness amped up (if only we could add a window). Open to any and all ideas that we can squeeze in. Please do suggest.

So there ya have it! Stay tuned for the weekend as we’ll be testing a few color options for our Pax door. Gosh, is it June already? Yikes.

As always, send us any questions and don’t forget to follow our Instagram stories. By the way, there are 20 SUPERB featured designers participating in the One Room Challenge with Better Homes and Gardens as a media partner. These guys and gals totally rock and will not disappoint. Check it out!

#oneroomchallenge #bhgorc