We’ve definitely gotten motivated to work on the house again, and I tackled an easy project last week that you can do in a few hours and immediately knock a room off your project list!
Our house is painted multiple colors, but we’re slowly going to reduce that to 1, maybe 2 colors. We just painted the laundry room repose gray and will slowly paint just about everything else that color, so I decided to knock out an easy project one weekend: the linen closet.
Linen Closet Refresh
What you’ll need:
- Paint (that matches your house)
- Paint that is 1-2 shades darker than ^^
- Brush
This is what the closet looked like before I started. Not terrible, but nothing special either.
My game plan was to paint the walls gray and then cover the shelves in some faux marble contact paper (clearly you know this didn’t work out). Since we ran out of paint while painting the laundry room, I went to Sherwin Williams and picked up another gallon of exactly what we already had.
Because it was the linen closet that no one goes in, I skipped the painter’s tape and just painted the walls free hand, going slow around the edges. I wasn’t too worried if I got paint on the shelves since I was going to cover them. Getting the area above the door opening was tricky, but nothing a step stool couldn’t solve and in about 2 hours I had a coat of paint in the closet.
Was it perfect? No. Was it “no one sees this room and would inspect the paint in here” perfect? Why yes it was 🙂 You couldn’t see the yellow color anymore and it was good enough for a closet!
After the paint dried on the walls, I was mapping out my plan to cover the shelves in my contact paper. I hadn’t expected each shelf to actually be 2 pieces of wood nailed into the closet though.. This was about the time my mom came into town to visit and we talked through my original plan. It was going to be a pain to implement, sooooo we decided to paint the shelves instead! After our visit to Drayton Hall (more to come there) we ran by Sherwin Williams to get a small can of paint that was 2 shades darker than the gray on the walls.
Reason 3898273420 why my mom is amazing: She painted the shelves while I went to work the next day. She did 1 coat, went on a walk and then did a second coat. Right when she was finishing, I came home early to hang out again!
After the shelves dried, I filled our linen closet again! I bought 2 baskets at Hobby Lobby (using that 40% off coupon) to hold smaller hand towels and misc medicines that don’t fit in our drawers. Our sheets & towels are white which looked great on the gray shelves. The colorful beach towels are on the top shelf and navy blue guest towels are on the bottom!
It’s amazing what a lil paint and a few hours can do! Having the shelves be a little darker adds some interest and I’m glad we ended up doing that instead of the contact paper.
Since all of our other rooms still have some percentage of work left before they are “done”, this is officially the first complete room in our new home! Gotta start small, right? Since our pantry is pretty similar, I think I’ll do something similar to that downstairs and I already have all I need on hand to get started 🙂
