Stamps Like Champs: Laundry Room

I know, it's been a very long time since my last blog. I actually had this blog ready to go back in November, but just haven't had the time to edit the pictures until now. So here we go - this is a really fun room to reveal! When we decided on this house and I was in the blissful "We're Building a Brand New House!!" phase, I started looking at Pinterest for ideas on all rooms of our house. We all know my obsession with tile, right? I love it...ALL of it. I came across encaustic tile on Pinterest and pretty quickly fell in love and I wanted to put it in the laundry room. In my opinion, encaustic tile, since it is so busy, looks best in small doses or small rooms. That's how I decided on putting that style of tile in the laundry room. It took me a while to finally decide on a tile, but I ultimately ended up with the common dark gray/white pattern. The reason I chose that is so I could do whatever I wanted on the walls. Steve surprised me with the tile as a 2017 Christmas gift, from Overstock. A note to keep in mind - if you are going to use encaustic tile somewhere, make sure you buy all that you need (plus the obligatory extra) in one order so that the color is the same throughout the entire pattern. Overstock advised that when ordering.

I agonized with the decision of what color grout to use. Seriously, agonized! Just ask Steve! I didn't officially decide on the grout until Steve was about to mix it. I was torn between white or dark gray (Charcoal Gray from Lowe's). Both colors are the wrong colors in the sense that they aren't the same shade that is in the tile and I couldn't visualize either of them very well in my head. Steve was leaning towards dark gray and he eventually talked me into it and I completely agree with him that that was the right decision. I think white would have been too much of a contrast and even though the gray doesn't completely match, it's a lot closer than white would have looked.

Our friend Nick (who is my BFF's husband) designs kitchens and kitchen cabinets. We reached out to Nick about having cabinets installed in our laundry room. Nick was able to help us out with that and he even brought every color sample to me to figure out what looked best with the tile. Here's the funny thing - before cabinets, I was starting to get in my mind that I wanted pink walls with copper accents. I still think that would look awesome, but I really liked the blue cabinet sample that Nick had and after many people agreeing with us, that's what we decided to get. Bye bye pink. But I kept the copper!

Copper accents include the light switch and outlet plates (Amazon), cabinet pulls (Amazon), and the trash can (Amazon). I'm still searching for a few other accents, but I don't know what they'll be. I've tried to find a light fixture in copper, but that's tough to find.

Since pink wouldn't look ideal with the blue cabinets, I stopped at Sherwin Williams and picked up a wide variety of white, gray, and blue samples because I had no idea what to paint the room other than it needed to go with the blue cabinets and work with copper accents. We chose Ice Cube by SW which is basically white, but now that it's on the walls, it looks gray to me.

The Wednesday before Thanksgiving, I got out of work early so I started painting the trim that Steve had reinstalled the night before. This was supposed to be an easy and quick task and we needed it done quickly because our friend and former neighbor, Brett, was coming over later that evening to help Steve install the cabinets (shout out, thanks Brett for your help!!). Keep in mind, we were also hosting Thanksgiving the next day, so we really didn't need any drama with finishing up the laundry room. While I was on the last piece of trim, I set down the paint can in an odd way on the grout and spilled half a can of paint on the beautiful new tile and grout. I stared at it for a minute trying to figure out how in the world I'm supposed to clean this up. I called Steve and as I told him what happened, I felt terrible because I had just messed up all of his hard work tiling the floor. He did a great job calming me down and told me to get some paper towels to start cleaning it up. As I started to wipe up the puddle of paint, I realized the grout had white paint drying in it. How in the world do we clean that up?! Steve tried a whole bunch of remedies he could find online like baking soda and water with a toothbrush, but that didn't work. A friend of mine recommended Goof Off which is basically acetone and that saved the day! I will never tell where I spilled paint in the laundry room! :-)

That was the last project until after the holidays. Since Thanksgiving, we've hosted our housewarming party (with 100 of our friends and family in the house all at once!), Christmas with the (former) neighbors, Christmas Eve, and Christmas morning. We took a well-deserved break for New Years Eve and stayed in and just enjoyed the house. We hope you all had a great holiday season and that you are looking forward to what 2019 will bring! For us, we still have many projects planned for the house: the deck is almost done (blog coming soon), Steve's planning his workbench for the third bay of the garage, our garden, pantry organization, the bar, and many others we've thought of. I thought that buying a new house meant we wouldn't have so many projects to do! ;-) Also, 2019 brings us the return of traveling!! Stay tuned for blogs about a cruise on the Danube River (April) and a trip to Minnesota for some National Parks (June). Thanks again for following our blog!