A European laundry makeover for less than $1000

Project file

Home owners: Rufaro Chakaingesu
Location: Reservoir, Melbourne
The project: Laundry renovation 
The budget: $1000
Rufaro’s top tip for renovators: ‘Do your planning: I look up the dimensions of all the different products I might use so I know the finished project will be seamless.’

We all know that feeling – you’ve cleaned up after dinner and finally got the toddler off to bed. Now to relax in front of Netflix. For Rufaro Chakaingesu and his wife Primrose though, sitting in the living room of their Melbourne home basically also meant sitting in the ‘laundry’.

When he’s being nice, Rufaro refers to the space as a European laundry; when he’s being realistic it’s a cupboard that opens onto the living room. ‘It was a laundry/trough setup with a shelf above the washing machine,’ Rufaro explains. ‘It was quite a generous size, but it was facing the lounge, which was unfortunate.’

Rufaro’s initial plan was to move the laundry to another area in the house, but it quickly became clear that was outside the budget for these first home owners. Rufaro says. ‘It’s a smaller house so if we took out the laundry we would have had more living space,’ Rufaro says. ‘But the quote we got was something like $10,000 to $15,000. That was definitely a “no”, so we decided to do it ourselves and make the space neat and tidy.’

Small laundry renovations

Before tackling the laundry, Rufaro had completed a successful kitchen makeover, giving him the confidence he needed to start on his second transformation. ‘The idea was to maximise storage – we wanted as much as possible,’ Rufaro says. 

It was the storage though, that was his first hurdle: making sure the wall could support the cupboards – a challenge in all laundry renovations – posed a problem. ‘My background is in construction, but I was a designer and had never built anything,’ Rufaro says. ‘I was a bit hesitant to just drill into the wall.’ 

That’s when Rufaro came up with the solution to his structural problem. Instead of attaching each cupboard to a stud, he attached two ‘rails’ to the studs and used that as his foundation.  ‘I just wasn’t sure if the cupboards would line up with the studs and I didn’t want to deal with that,’ Rufaro says. ‘So, I ran two long pieces of timber along the wall and drilled them to the studs. Then I put the cabinets onto those, which was much easier.’  

Laundry renovation ideas: Rufaro’s viral shelving

Between the cupboards, Rufaro built custom shelving to fit the space. ‘I got some melamine timber looking panels from Bunnings and just designed it and built it on the fly,’ he says. ‘Once I put up the white cupboards on either end of the laundry, I knew the space we had and thought let’s just try and make the most of it. The proportions worked out a treat and it definitely had the visual appeal I wanted.’

Rufaro wasn’t the only one impressed by his shelving. When he uploaded his laundry project to the Bunnings Workshop Community so many people asked how to replicate his design that the Bunnings Worksop Team did a detailed tutorial around the shelves. (You can find it in the comments section under Rufaro’s laundry makeover project post.) ‘I think someone actually ended up building something similar,’ says Rufaro, who is known as @diy_hausdesigns in the community. ‘That was pretty cool.’

But how much did it cost?

Perhaps the best part of the whole project – according to Rufaro – is the laundry renovation cost: it came in under $1000, excluding the plumbing, which is where Rufaro called in the professionals. 

‘It was supposed to be low budget, but I wanted it to look good,’ he says, noting it was also a quick project to finish. ‘I put the cabinets together the night before. Then on the day, I put the timber on the wall, screwed in the cabinets and then went outside and designed and built the shelves, which maybe took a couple hours. I was done by 4 pm.’