A grey plastic utility sink, a frameless mirror, and a wall of exposed hoses. That was the whole laundry. No bench, no drawers, nowhere to put anything down. The couple behind it didn’t hire a designer or a builder. They mapped the entire room in a free online planner, then built and installed it themselves, tiles and all.
Most people miss the real lesson in a laundry like the one @mykindofbliss started with. The window is in the same spot. The machines are the same machines. The room didn’t get bigger. What changed is that every surface started earning its keep, and the whole thing was planned on a screen before a single cabinet went in.
What follows is how a rental-grade laundry became a room that works, one decision at a time. Steal whichever ones fit your space.
Stand in the doorway of the old room and you can read the problem instantly. Two machines, a trough jammed in beside them, and a strip of bare floor. Nowhere to fold. Nowhere to store. The kind of laundry you back out of the moment the cycle ends.
That diagnosis matters, because the fixes that follow all trace back to it.
1. The trough was the first thing to go
The freestanding plastic trough is the single most dated thing in most older laundries, and it’s doing nothing for you. It hogs floor space, it can’t be built into anything, and it reads cheap the second you walk in.
In its place: a white drop-in sink dropped straight into the new bench. The sink becomes part of the counter instead of a lump standing on its own. That one move is what lets the rest of the wall turn into a continuous, usable surface.
If you take one idea from this whole reno, make it this: a drop-in sink in a run of bench will always look more finished than a standalone tub.
2. A benchtop over the machines doubled the usable space
Front-loaders have a flat top going to waste. Run a bench across them and that dead zone becomes the most useful surface in the room: somewhere to fold, sort, stack, and set down a basket without bending.
The bench here is a timber-look laminate (Kaboodle’s honeywood, per the creator). Warm wood tone against white tile is what keeps a hardworking surface from feeling clinical. It softens the whole room while doing the heavy lifting.
The takeaway for your own space: measure the height of your machines first, then size the bench to clear them. The payoff is a folding station you didn’t have to find extra floor for.
3. Two small fixtures did most of the styling
Before, the tap was a plastic cross-handle thing wired to a marbled-tile wall, and the mirror was a frameless rectangle with the silvering going at the edges. Neither cost much attention. Both quietly aged the room.
After, the tap is a brushed gold gooseneck and the mirror is an arched, gold-framed piece. Matching the metals across tap and mirror frame is the trick that makes a budget room look pulled-together. Gold on gold reads intentional.
Up close you can see the restraint. Shaker fronts in a soft greige (cremasala), plain round knobs, no busy hardware. It’s a calm base that lets the gold do the talking. Worth copying if you want warmth without the room feeling fussy.
4. The bare wall became storage and a splashback
Every laundry has this wall, and nobody photographs it: black cords looping down, grey hoses, a blank painted wall above. Functional, ugly, ignored.
Her answer came in two parts. A vertical-stack white tile splashback runs up the wall, and cabinets go in below the bench. Vertical tile draws the eye up and makes a low room feel taller, which is exactly what you want when the ceiling is close. The creator confirms they tiled all the way under the cabinets too, so nothing looks unfinished where it meets the floor.
For a similar wall, the move is simple: tile the zone you see, hide the plumbing behind cabinetry, and let the splashback do the visual work.
5. The layout finally gave the room real storage
Storage in the old room amounted to exactly nothing. The new layout stacks it three ways: a full-height cabinet at one end, upper cabinets along the top, and the run of lower cabinets under the bench. In the creator’s own words, they finally have storage and bench space where there was none.
Same wall, same door, same window in both. They didn’t move plumbing or knock anything out. Keeping the machines and the wet zone where they already were is what kept this a DIY job instead of a trades job. The layout got smarter without getting more expensive.
If your laundry is a single-wall galley like this one, that’s the lesson worth holding onto: build up and build in before you ever think about moving a wall. Small laundries reward this kind of vertical, built-in thinking more than they reward square footage.
6. The whole thing started in a free app
This is the part that makes the reno repeatable rather than just admirable. The couple designed the entire room in Kaboodle’s free 3D planner before buying a thing. Set the render beside the finished photos and they line up: same cabinet run, same bench, same machine placement.
The planner runs to the room’s actual measurements, so the cabinets were sized to the wall before anything was ordered. Designing to real dimensions on screen is what removes the guesswork that usually sends people to a professional. You see the layout, you get a budget breakdown as you go, and you build from a plan you can trust.
That’s the genuinely useful takeaway here. A free planning tool, used carefully, can carry a regular homeowner through the scariest part of a reno, the part where you’re not sure it will fit or work. These owners proved it can, and the room you’re looking at is the result. If you’re weighing up your own small laundry, it’s worth seeing how others have maximized the same tight footprint before you start measuring.
All images courtesy of @mykindofbliss. See the full reveal on Instagram.
