Jack's yellow ceiling!

This is your sign to paint your ceiling! I love how fun this room is now that the ceiling is painted!

Laundry Room Before + After | Tacoma Mural Artist

There’s a lot about the floorplan of this house that doesn’t make much sense, and the dead space in the kitchen/laundry closet area was definitely one of the more glaring instances. Since the back door is right there, it became an odd catch-all junk space that you had to wade through to do laundry. Despite the fact that it was open square footage, having that floor space in the kitchen never felt like it actually added anything because there wasn’t much you could do with the room other than fill it with random stuff.

Annoyed with the total lack of a laundry room in the house, I realized that it wouldn’t take much to build a couple of walls that encompassed that awkward dead space and turn it into an actual laundry room.

Material Sources

Wainscoting paint: Behr Paint— Broadway (eggshell)
Sheen mural paint- Behr Paint— Broadway (matte and high gloss)
Cabinets- unfinished cabinets from Home Depot
Cabinet paint- Behr Paint— Lemongrass (eggshell)
Cabinet hardware- Liberty black bar pulls from Home Depot
Ceiling Wallpaper- Zebra Marble gifted from Tempaper
Light fixture: Vinluz 8-light Sputnik chandelier from Amazon
Rug- Buckman flatweave rug from Rejuvenation
Counter- Walnut butcher block from Home Depot
French Door Paint - Behr Paint— Emergency Zone (eggshell)
Backsplash tile - Floor and Decor— Maravilla Basalt Black Stacked Mosaic
Floor Tile- Floor and Decor — Concrete Grey Ceramic Tile
Washer/Dryer- Kenmore (secondhand via Craigslist)
French Doors- second hand from Second Use Building Materials

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I pulled out the doorway drywall and framing, then got to work framing out the new walls, adding and moving some electrical outlets and switches, added a ceiling light in the new room, and got the drywall up.

The design for the room, finish-wise, evolved over time, especially as I added the mural on the outside of the wall, which then impacted what I wanted the inside of the room to look like, considering you could see into the room through the glass french doors.

The Lemongrass cabinet color was a last minute decision and I’m really glad I went bold with the cabinets, especially since I went black with the rest of the walls. I love the pop of color and the added lightness in an area that could’ve ended up being a dark corner.

I loved the mix of curved and straight lines of the mural on the outside of the laundry room, and I wanted something that echoed that design without being a direct replica. I ended up doing a mural playing on sheen instead of colors, opting to use both matte and high gloss sheens of the same black I used for the the quarter-circle mural outside the room.

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For the ceiling, I knew that I didn’t want a plain ceiling. I love utilizing that wall for a design element, especially in a smaller space. I saw this Zebra Marble removable wallpaper at Tempaper and knew it’d be the perfect design to finish off the room.

Since we have a brass sputnik chandelier in the kitchen, I wanted something that had a similar feel but wasn’t exactly the same. I love this one because it’s more modestly sized, basically flush mount so it doesn’t hang down at all, and it looks especially fancy against the backdrop of the wallpaper!

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I think my favorite thing about the whole room is that it feels like it’s always been there. Sometimes I forget that it didn’t even exist when we first moved in. Projects that seamlessly integrate into a house always end up being my favorite because of that reason. It feels like you’re honoring the house itself, creating something that belonged there all along.

And at least now I can feel a little fancier when I’m doing laundry!

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Kitchen Mural Reveal | Tacoma Mural Artist

After I built out this laundry room in the awkward corner of our kitchen, I knew the wall wanted to have some kind of statement on it. But dang did it take forever to figure out what that statement was going to be. This design was actually inspired by a tile design where each square tile had a quarter circle on it, when meant you could completely customize the design. So I pulled a pic of this spot into photoshop and played around with quarter circles until I landed on something that felt good.

But my favorite element came later. I had been seeing this orange color around and I knew I wanted to incorporate it into the house. My original plan was for the french doors to be painted black, but then a bell went off in my head and I knew they had to be orange. I grabbed a paint chip (which ended up being the exact same color as Home Depot’s signature orange, haha) and bought a little paint sample (a paint sample size is usually enough to paint a door— and they’re only a couple bucks!). A few hours later the doors were orange and it MADE the space.

It’s so wild to look at the before pic and see that sad corner with the laundry closet. The space planning in this house by whoever built it is down right bananas, folks. Like… was that supposed to be a breakfast nook? It didn’t feel big enough for a table there, but it’s still a lot of square feet of wasted space. Now we have a laundry room with added cabinetry for storage, a more defined rear entry area for dropping keys, coats, etc, and they functionality and flow through the space isn’t impacted whatsoever.

Now… I just have to finish the final details on the inside of the laundry room…

DIY Painted Faux Tile Backsplash

My ultimate plan for our kitchen backsplash involves a gorgeous black zellige tile, but I knew that it would be a while until we got that tile project underway. In the meantime, I decided to have fun with a hand-painted backsplash that gave the effect of a faux tile look. I absolutely love how much depth the dark backsplash adds to the space!

Hand painting isn’t for everyone and there are other affordable but less tedious and time-consuming ways to upgrade your backsplash, like stick-on tiles, removable wallpaper, and paint stencils. You can even get a stencil that mimics this hexagon design!

For my process, I used chalk to trace the hexagon shape onto the wall, then used a straightedge to draw the lines inside the hexagons with chalk. Once that template was on the wall, I used a small craft paintbrush to paint interior latex paint along those lines. Definitely tedious! But I did this in the midst of the post-election madness and a tedious project that needed a lot of focus what a pleasant distraction, haha.

Eclectic Modern Bathroom Remodel

This before and after still rocks my world a little bit. Truth be told it’s not a true after, there are still projects to be done in here. but, I mean, come on. Are these two rooms even the same?! It’s wild. The layout for this room is strange. I’m really not entirely sure what the person who laid out this space was thinking, but gutting it and rearranging just wasn’t in the budget.

We kept pretty much everything and just reworked it. The vanity is the same, but I put new slab doors on, sanded down the original vanity to its natural oak and then whitewashed it to keep the modern light look that the raw wood had (putting poly over the raw wood would have turned it back into the ugly orangey color of the original bathroom— no thanks!).

For whatever reason, the old vanity had a strange vacant cavity next to the cabinet under the counter. What went there? Who knows. Probably just cobwebs and grime. I added some open shelves there which are perfect for holding baskets with hair product (curly girls represent!), and the bottom shelf is the perfect spot for extra TP rolls.

The large linen closet storage on the left side of the vanity got a slatted upgrade, I just refinished the existing door and trim the same way I did the vanity cabinet, and then added oak slats.

This bathroom is not hurting for storage so the massive medicine cabinet mirror was absolutely not necessary. a streamlined simple brass mirror took it’s place, and the sorely dated vanity lighting got a midcentury modern upgrade.

Dingy white walls be gone! I did a textured wall treatment, giving the walls a plaster-y look to remove the dated orange peel texture, and then painted a moody blue-ish green-ish teal, Valspar’s Everglade Deck.

Obviously the showstopper of the space is the stunning cement hex tile from Riad Tile. I’ve eyed so many styles from Riad for years and this large wall behind the vanity basically begged for a statement wall. I’m absolutely obsessed with how this tile completely transforms the room.

And to replace the old formica counter, we did a poured concrete counter! This whole space was a DIY update, and we did everything we could to do budget friendly updates, use what existing elements we could, and worked around the layout so we could create the maximum update for minimum cost. I did pretty much everything myself, except the poured concrete counter and the floor tile, which my husband took on (though I did cut the floor tile, so we’ll call that one a joint effort).

If you want to see the before images, scroll down!

We’ve got some other big projects in the works so this space is basically on hold for now. It has an ugly ivory fiberglass tub/surround which desperately needs to be replaced, but it works fine and I can hide it behind a pretty shower curtain, so for the time being it stays. A pretty white tub and tiled surround will happen someday! In the meantime, I just bask in the glow of the tile wall.

tile c/o Riad Tile