before and after

Tudor Home Laundry Room Makeover – Part 1

This post is in partnership with Elkay® to help us share our story of slowly restoring our vintage cabinets. Read on to learn how this family-owned company came to our rescue with a custom solution!

Our laundry room is a unique situation. When we turned our attached garage into our now kitchen, we transitioned the old galley kitchen into our laundry room. The original cabinets, although beautiful, were very beat up and the finish had yellowed over time. The laminate countertop and backsplash were in poor condition. The small double bowl sink was not very functional and the faucet was on its way out. But for eight years, we made due with what we had and did our best to organize + tidy it up.

This year, with us hunkering down at home, we wanted to give this room a proper makeover while still honoring the history of our Tudor style home. And boy were we dedicated, doing most of the work ourselves! There is a lot to cover with this makeover so I’m going to break it out into two posts.

patticakewagner laundry room makeover.JPG

While it would’ve been easier to tear everything out and start from scratch, there was no way that we would part with the original wood stain shaker cabinets. We saw its potential and so our remodel revolved around it.

laundry room before

laundry room before

Being that we live in an old house (built in 1927), there were definitely a few challenges with these vintage birch cabinets.

  1. they are more shallow than the standard so we were worried about finding a single bowl sink to fit

  2. discovering they contain lead finish

  3. figuring out the stain color and getting a consistent look.

In this Part 1 post, I’m going to cover the first challenge – finding the perfect sink for our shallow cabinets thanks to Elkay. Before we learned about their custom stainless solutions, we were clueless about where to search and wanted to share our experience in case you are in the same situation.

As America’s No. 1 selling kitchen sink company, we knew they made quality products and when we learned about their custom service, we were so relieved! Elkay provides custom + modified stainless products which means modifications can be made to their existing catalog products. We were also really happy that the ordering process was easy! We provided them with our cabinet dimensions and they came back with CAD renderings to help us order just the right one.

Elkay’s Custom Stainless Solutions was perfect for our non-standard size cabinets

Elkay’s Custom Stainless Solutions was perfect for our non-standard size cabinets

After a couple round of renderings and confirming the dimensions, we ordered the Stainless Steel Single Bowl Undermount sink. I was so excited for the practicality of a single bowl in our laundry room. Brian was more excited about all the technical stuff like its 16 gauge thickness, made with type 304 stainless steel. Which means the finish is scratch resistant to heavy-duty use and deep scratches are repairable. It also has sound-deadening pad(s) to minimize sound and vibration for a quieter time at the sink – definitely useful for when you wash dishes if installed in the kitchen.

Our Custom Elkay Sink Installation Day

Our Custom Elkay Sink Installation Day

We had a smooth and pleasant experience with this entire process and would highly recommend Elkay to anyone looking for a custom sink. *Please note that custom orders are non-cancelable and non-returnable.

I’m going to follow up with Part 2 of this makeover to share our journey with refinishing the cabinets and other design details. But because I don’t want to keep you waiting, I’m excited to share more photos of the reveal! We are so happy with how everything turned out and proud of all the labor of love poured into this project. You know what we mean if you’ve been following along with my IG stories.

patticakewagner laundry room makeover

And since you’ll probably ask, the nicely designed faucet is also from Elkay. It is the Allure Single Hole Kitchen Faucet. We wanted one with low flow which is a water-saving feature, a fully rotating spout and a side spray so this faucet checked all the boxes. It is both ADA compliant and lead-free compliant. It also has a 2/5” max thickness which means it can be installed in countertops up to 2.5” thick.

patticakewagner laundry room makeover
patticakewagner laundry room makeover

Here are some before and after photos to get a better idea of the transformation.

BEFORE

BEFORE

AFTER

AFTER

BEFORE

BEFORE

patticakewagner laundry room makeover

I’ll be sharing Part 2 of this makeover soon with more photos! Come back to learn more about how we restored these vintage cabinets through sanding and re-staining and other design details like picking out the backsplash (read more here on all the options we explored). We hope you can learn from our experience and mistakes that we made along the way. Thank you so much for following along with this project friends! Appreciate you sharing in our enthusiasm.

Patti

Sweetest Regards, Patti