My husband and I purchased our first home in the South Shore area of Massachusetts in February 2013. It's a very old house built in the 1830s. The previous owners did quite a bit of cosmetic updating (but left the knob and tube for some maddening reason). The only room in the entire house left mostly untouched was the laundry room/closet. It has home made shelves and cabinets and terrible wood paneling.
We started off thinking we'd tear everything down, put up some drywall, and hang some new cabinets. We quickly realized doing drywall would take more skill then we had.
Then we thought we'd find out how much it would be to get someone to drywall for us, but every contractor we contacted either didn't get back to us (too small of a job?) or was really only willing to do the whole thing....for $4000 <-- we do NOT want a $4000 laundry room!
So there we were staring at our ugly laundry room last night when I finally realized we could leave most of it intact, and just re-panel the areas that had bad paneling (tons of little pieces), and paint over the paneling (as has been done in other rooms in the house). I'm very pleased we've come up with a middle ground between a highend laundry room remodel and a "don't fix it if it ain't broken" attitude.
If you see any holes in this plan (other than the ones in my walls), let me know!