Painted Laundry Room Cabinets

Pick up some Craig’s List cabinets, freshen with a coat of paint and upgrade your laundry room (on a very small budget).

I bought these cabinets through MaxSold – a sort of online garage sale – and while they look pretty rough:

they were the right measurements to fit where I wanted them in my unfinished laundry room and the price couldn’t be beat.

I picked them up knowing that I was committing myself to a cabinet makeover at some point.

I’ve added a faux wall to my laundry room and I’ve built a giant folding table (which I absolutely LOVE), I’ve built an ironing board holder and a central vac hose reel and even a drying rack – so all that was left to do was tackle the cupboards.

I was putting it off because I was feeling intimidated by the amount of work I thought I’d have to do.

Turns out, painting these cabinets wasn’t nearly as difficult as I’d feared.

These laundry room cabinets are Ikea – which means that’s a faux-wood veneer on the front and staining is out of the question. Fine by me – Jillian Harris posted her blue laundry room about 6 months ago and it’s been on my wish list ever since.

I did have to use a fair amount of wood filler to cover up all of those nicks and dents, and I knew I was going to use new drawer pulls, so I filled in the old holes as well.

With painted laundry room cabinets, it’s really important to get the surface as smooth as possible. Even if that means buying out all the wood filler in your country. (wink)

Once the wood filler was completely dry, I sanded down my cupboard and drawer fronts with 120 grit, followed by 220 grit sandpaper.

I washed everything down with Krud Kutter and then wiped it clean with a damp cloth.

Time for priming!

Yes, you HAVE TO prime.

Your paint won’t stick and will peel off if you don’t prime your cabinets with at least one coat of strong primer. Because these cabinets will be in my laundry room, there will be a fair amount of moisture in the air when the laundry is going. I decided to use an outdoor-appropriate primer for these as it allows for more expansion and contraction than one rated for indoor use only.

Two coats later and it’s finally time to get some colour on!

I sanded the primer coats smooth with 320 grit sandpaper to give me a glassy-smooth surface to paint on and then I brought out my sprayer and got to work.

The colour is Behr Shaved Ice (N490-3) and is a nice blue-grey.

I sprayed two coats on the fronts, backs sides and even inside of the drawers and cupboard. What do you think of my new painted laundry room cabinets?!

You could totally do this without a paint sprayer, so don’t feel intimidated that a special tool is necessary. You can get a beautiful finish with a foam roller and a light touch (just to make sure there are no bubbles). The light would reflect slightly differently with a tiny bit of stippling in the finish – but you’d never know if I didn’t just tell you.

I upgraded the hardware from the boring Ikea knobs to these beautiful and sleek Maenza pulls from Liberty Hardware.

*Sponsored: I was provided these Maenza drawer pulls from Liberty Hardware for an earlier project, but didn’t use them at the time. They seemed to be the perfect addition for these painted laundry room cabinets though!

What a difference!

You’d never guess that these painted laundry room cabinets were the same damaged Ikea ones from earlier would you?

Yes, it’s still and unfinished basement laundry room – and unfortunately, it will probably stay that way for as long as we live here (Hubby doesn’t want all the wiring and pipes covered with drywall so he can’t access them) but it’s considerably better than when I started.