laundry room makeover

I don't exactly have a laundry room, per se - but I do have a laundry area. It's in the unfinished part of my basement, AKA The Dungeon. The area basically consists of a washer and dryer with two ugly pieces of plywood serving as shelves, nailed onto plywood above the washer and dryer.

These shelves became a catch-all for all kinds of stuff: snacks, cat food, rags, laundry detergent, extra Tupperware, a plastic grocery bag filled with cut-out recipes, and lots of dust.

I'm a little embarrassed to even show you all what the area looked like BEFORE:

Here's the AFTER:

This was just a super-quick-maybe-one-hour makeover on a Saturday afternoon. I started out by taking everything off the shelves, taking the shelves down and washing them in the laundry tub, then lining them with yellow "rubbery" contact paper from Wal-Mart. It doesn't have any sticky backing, but "holds" to the shelves with its rubbery material.

I then took a look in my scrapbook papers and found some yellow and purple papers I liked. I simply taped those to the drywall beside the shelves.

Found a copper wire basket that used to hang in my kitchen and hung that above the washing machine to hold the rags and clothespins. The green basket on the bottom shelf is from Michaels. I'm using that to hold the cat food cans. The little round basket on the top shelf (found in one of my bins of household decor) holds dryer sheets. The green bird planter on the top shelf holds extra plastic grocery bags that I use when I scoop out the cat boxes.

I then added some cheerful decor that again, I found in my stash of household decor.

Now if the Laundry Fairy would just make a visit to my house...