Obviously, with 5 children, the kitchen is the busiest room in our house. It is the one room that can be sparkling clean one minute and a major disaster the next. The second craziest room in the house is the laundry room. To be honest, in every house we’ve owned this has been the case. I’ll be doing great; keeping up with the washing and folding then something like a stomach virus will hit the house and it’s game over. Another problem that persists in that room is that it becomes a drop off point for things that can’t easily find a home. For example, we have a microscope that we use a least once a week; but I don’t usually want the samples we are examining in the school room which is upstairs and more difficult to disinfect. I prefer to use the microscope in the kitchen. We keep it in its original box and up on a shelf in the laundry room. I have lots of party supplies, art, and science experiment supplies in there too.

It was looking sad and since quite a bit of my time is spent in there, I decided to spend some time and effort to pretty it up. Because this room is low priority for everyone else, I wanted to getting it looking happier, but at minimal expense.

I’m not 100% finished with this just yet, but I’m way closer than I was last week :0)

I like to keep the detergent and the scent booster in glass containers that are not easily opened by little hands. Also, the blue liquid is Dawn dish soap. I have found it is one of the best stain removers around.

I saved my Lilly Pulitzer catalogs for the prints. The prints are so colorful and happy that I just had to use them in this room. The picture frames are from Dollar Tree.

Lillian made the Lilly Pulitzer print Disney Cinderella castle on canvas for me for my birthday. She also painted the little beach scene. The polka dotted box holds the sewing machine.

I used pretty wrapping paper to cover the ugly boxes that were being stored on the shelves. All of the boxes are either open at the top or are wrapped in a way that makes it super easy to open them. The pink polka dotted box is the microscope and the one next to it is a box of old t-shirts for messy crafts or science. The basket is full of our tablecloths. The other basket has some art stuff and a huge pot that doesn’t fit anywhere else.

See the rock.

From a big box of oyster shells that I bought almost two years ago for crafts, I picked these out and hot glued them to the cabinet pulls. We painted them with a gold paint (that I bought with a 40% off coupon) from Hobby Lobby.

These rock pulls from Home Goods replaced the ugly ones on the closet doors.

Here’s the sad before pictures:

I still have a little more to do.  This project cost about $70 and a few hours of time (mostly shopping), but it does make the second busiest room of the house a little bit happier and more colorful!