My husband and I built our house about eight years ago. Since then, I have painted and decorated every square inch except for the laundry room. It is a huge room that houses our awesome front-loading washer and dryer, pantry items (which take up an entire wall) and the dreaded cat litter boxes (yes, box
es). We are considering putting our house on the market this spring so I wanted to give the laundry room a little "overhaul". During the winter break, my handy husband put bead board and chair rail up and painted the walls a beautiful green. (The paint is Mother Nature by Behr.) Thanks to my hubby, the laundry room/pantry went from drab to fab!!
While I was stalking the boards on Pinterest, I came across some cute wooden signs that I could make to accentuate my beautiful new laundry room. I dragged my hubby and the boys to a craft store to check out baskets (to go on my newly organized shelves, of course) and to get some pre-cut wooden "blocks".
I found 7 - 5x7 blocks, 2 - 5x7 blocks with routed edges and 1- 5x7 with a really wavy design. All for .99 cents each! (I also picked up some ribbon that was buy one get one free!) I painted the wood with a titanium white craft paint. I let that dry completely before the next step.
I wanted a kind of shabby/worn/antiqued look so I decided to paint the edges with a dark black craft paint. I didn't like the effect of my first method. I started by taking a very small brush loaded with paint, running it along the different edges, and wiping it off with a paper towel while it was still wet. I think that looked too messy or something. So I repainted my blocks and then took a very small dry brush that I had dipped in the paint (and then wiped most of the paint off of)and ran that along the edges. I wiped the excess paint off with a towel, but I could have probably skipped this step. I really like the effect!
I cut the letters I need to spell out "LAUNDRY" and "wash", "dry", "fold" on my Cricut using the
Plantin SchoolBook cartridge. I cut the letters out on black cardstock and used ModgePodge as the adhesive. I applied it with a foam brush and then used my fingers to smooth the letters down. After all the letters were in place, I applied a coat of ModgePodge to the top of all of the wooden blocks as a sealer.
I attached my buy-one-get-one-free ribbon to the back of the blocks using my hot glue gun. I tied a bow to the top of the loops of the "wash", "dry", "fold" blocks.
I think I might get some knobs to hang the signs from, but I was really anxious to see how the signs looked on the wall.
**update** I got some knobs (two wooden and one glass/crystal) at a home improvement store to hang these signs from. I painted the two wooden ones using craft paint and added some bling. The one on the left is painted with a stripe and the one on the far right is my attempt at argyle. LOL The diameter of the striped knob is 1 1/2 and the diameter or the argyle knob is 2.
