The Light in the Laundry Room

We recently remodeled our basement laundry room. Picture sunny yellow walls, crisp white wainscot, perfectly lined up squares of industrial-looking floor tile. It’s all just too lovely for words. Or at least for a laundry room.

But my favorite thing is the lighting. A total of 520 watts of pure incandescent brightness, baby.

The size of our basement laundry room is about 100 square feet, or so my husband tells me. When he first said how many lights he wanted to install, I scoffed. Why in the world do we need eight recessed 65-watt floodlights in a space that small?

Sure, it’s in the basement and sure, there are no windows, but really? Eight lights seemed like overkill.

My husband, who loves all things relating to stage and theatrical lighting, stuck to his lumens. Turns out, he was right.

Eight lights isn’t overkill. It’s heavenly.

Dirty laundry is the bane of housewives and mothers everywhere. When I Googled “piles of laundry” the other day, I got 2.67 million results. Once you slog through all the how-to articles, I’m guessing a hefty percentage of the rest are blog posts lamenting this dreaded chore.

Not in my house.

Dare I even say it? Thanks to the light, doing laundry is a joy. Yes, a joy.

I love light. My favorite room in my house is the living room, where four huge southern-facing windows flood the room with light most of the day. It makes me happy just to be in there.

The opposite also is true. When I drive down the street near my daughter’s school—the one with the canopy of trees so thick no sunlight gets through at all—I can barely breathe. I can’t wait to turn the corner so I can head for the roundabout where the sun shines through the branches. It’s physical and mental and emotional, this thing I have with light.

I didn’t like the laundry room before, for many reasons. The HVAC/water heater closet that was missing a wide louvered door. The uneven concrete floor. The red, white and blue plaid wallpaper and barn-red woodwork. The lone fluorescent light fixture in the stained tile ceiling. The lack of windows.

I didn’t like it for these reasons and more, but I didn’t realize how dark and dingy it was until the light came.

When we turned on the lights for the first time, it was as if the gates of heaven opened and a celestial choir burst into the Hallelujah Chorus.

This was before anything else had been done in the laundry room, mind you. Everything I just described was still there, in all its stark ugliness.

It was the light that made the difference.