Bright and clean

Okay, well I'm happy to drop a little taste of our completely finished house. It's the laundry room, which is in the current issue of Canadian House & Home, and to quote a 1968 cigarette slogan You've come a long way baby. To see how vile it actually looked when we first bought the house click here. Yep, that's ugly, lol. Not to mention all the weird stuff we discovered when we ripped out the old basement kitchen - Part of a garden fence was behind the wall and the ceiling was suspended with sticks from apple boxes and an old chair leg. Seriously.

Here's a quick rundown of what you're looking at: We maxed out on storage and usability with Ikea kitchen cabinets fronted in Abstrakt white hi-gloss doors and a Numerar countertop (just out of view on the left there's a Lagan sink with a slick white Ringskar faucet). Built into the cabinetry on the left are the fantabulous  GE Profile SmartDispense laundry pair, more on them here. That sweet carpet is the Spun hand-knotted runner by Bev Hisey, and the wood floor beneath is actually this TrafficMaster Allure vinyl plank from Home Depot. [Image: Angus Fergusson]

A snap in the laundry

I am a magpie at heart, and honestly can spy cool bits and bobs at twenty paces. My antique dealer granny, Lena, is probably to blame, since she dragged me along to jumble sales as a kid. She would bribe our way to the front of the line so we could head in and scour the tables before the hoi-polloi had a chance. Ah, childhood memories, lol.

Last night I spied that cool Snap tin below at a friend's house, high on a shelf in their front hall. Up until that point it held their dog Trav's cookies, and now it's sitting pretty on a shelf in our laundry room. Honestly, I offered to pay, but in the end I think we swapped it for tomatoes picked from our garden. So, thanks Michael, Jen and Trav! Those cool Number Mason Jars to the left are these fresh finds from Pottery Barn, while that rather odd carved teak bull I snagged ages ago at a Value Village. Oh, and don't worry about Trav; his cookies are now housed rather smartly in a vintage Peanuts lunch box.

Buh-bye serial killer's den

We are totally ending the week on a high note. The laundry area is now a picture of streamlined modernity, completely kitted out with Ikea kitchen cabinetry to maximize on desperately needed storage (errr, coz we had none, lol). Just take a look at that first shot below, snapped when we first bought the house 13 months ago. Ummm, yep, it was obviously the vile den of a serial killer. If anything, the photo makes it look way nicer than it was - Seriously.

I hafta tell you the Ikea installers were stellar. Apart from doing a brill job fitting the cabinets into quite the wonky space, they swept up after themselves and left the place spotless. So, here's the what's what in laundry land, with a few extra pics below to help figure things out - Abstrakt white hi-gloss doors, aluminum and white Numerar countertop, Strecket handles, a Lagan sink and a completely gorgeous white Ringskar faucet (which'll be installed on Monday). It's laundry love fo' sho'.