Long time, no post! Today, it's all about my organized laundry room. It's been quite a work in progress since we moved to our house over 3 years ago, but I think I finally have it where I want it. Crazy that it took me so long for such a tiny room. Oh well. Our laundry room is right off of our eat-in kitchen. There is also a door from the laundry room to our playroom in the sunroom. I am very grateful that it is where it is, as opposed to being in the basement as is the case for many homes. I am also grateful that it is its own room, regardless of the small size. Anyway, on with the tour!
First I will show a few before pictures. Here it is when we saw the house before we bought it.
Then we added some cabinets and painted it yellow. I like yellow okay, but looking back, this never looked good.
We have since had to replace the dryer and removed the utility sink which we never used. The piping is still there just in case we change our minds one day. We also recently installed new flooring and painted it a pale bluish green color, which is so much better! Now it looks like this.
Here you can see where it is off of the kitchen. Super convenient. There is a pocket door in the wall should we not want to see the laundry room. I also close it when the machines are running to cut down on the noise in the kitchen.
Now for the details! I found some wall baskets at Marshall's and decided to keep all of my cleaners in them. I organized them by dusting, multi-purpose, bathroom, stain/odor removers, natural ingredients and cloths. As I mentioned earlier, the door to our sunroom opens up to this wall with the baskets. It still opens far enough, but we literally never ever use it anyway. There is another door to the sunroom from our kitchen. I also keep our vacuum cleaner here and a tall laundry basket. We only have hampers in the kids' rooms, so my husband and I just throw our clothing in the basket in the laundry room. Usually the kids' dirty clothing can be found all around the house. I am always picking it up and taking it right to the laundry room. That basket rarely overflows because I usually end up doing at least one load of wash per day.
Across from this wall is my Expedit shelf and Alex drawer unit from Ikea. The Expedit holds a hodgepodge of items. Along the top I have some Thirty One bags (I keep all of them tucked inside the gray Super Organizing Tote), a bin for all of my cameras and accessories and the black bag is for my DSLR.
The next shelf down has a few magazine files where I keep my favorite issues of Storage, Do It Yourself, HGTV, etc. and a few books as well. I also keep extra paper towels and tissues here.
The next shelf is where I keep batteries, light bulbs, our warranties and manuals binder and extra school supplies. I reach for those supplies when my kids are low on something in their pencil boxes at school. I stocked up on them during the back to school sales. You can read about my warranties binder here. You can read about my organized batteries here.
The two baskets and two white boxes on the last two shelves are for the kids' crafts. They love arts and crafts. In here you can find big boxes of crayons, extra coloring books, sand art, crafts kits and bigger items like their ICEE maker and Crayola airbrush kit.
Next to the Expedit is our Alex drawer unit. In here we keep even more kid craft supplies. This is for the most often used items. In here are crayons and markers, glue, paint, stickers, tattoos, small arts and crafts, and lots of coloring and activity books. I wrote about it awhile ago when we kept it out in the kitchen. You can read about that here. It has obviously worked its way into the laundry room where I like it much better. I changed out the labels, but that's about all that's changed.
On top of the Alex drawers are two small fabric bins from Bed Bath & Beyond. There I keep some more cleaning cloths, sponges, scrub brushes and a few tools to keep upstairs. I printed these labels from A Bowl Full of Lemons. Toni recently shared her beautiful laundry room with her readers. You can read all about that and get her free labels here.
Next to the Alex drawers is a little rolling cart that I found at Bed Bath & Beyond. I needed something to hide the pipes that were left over from our utility sink. I am sure we could probably take them down somehow, but since we aren't sure if we ever want to have a sink again, and my husband said he doesn't know what to do with those, we are keeping them there. This cart fits perfectly over the pipes and looks much better. On here I am keeping our family change bucket which works out perfectly for all of those loose coins I find in my husband's pockets. For now I also have our lazy susan for our kitchen table stored here. We don't always use it, so it doesn't need to be on the table all of the time. On the bottom shelf is my cleaning caddy which I fill up with products to take around the house on a cleaning day. Above the cart is a cute shelf I picked up at Target. I am just using it to hang wash bags for delicate items, some cleaning cloths and cleaning books. I have since moved the orange duster to the broom rack on the other wall.
The first cabinet above our machines contains laundry detergent, stain removers, dryer sheets, extra mop pads and rubber gloves. The other cabinet contains clothespins and my cute little Singer sewing kit. There should be another shelf in here, but we bought these on clearance and the shelf was missing. At some point we will cut a new shelf for in here. There are two baskets on top of these shelves. In the shallow one I keep our tablets and old iPhones. I keep them in here during the week to keep them away from the kids. This is a recent thing. I was so fed up with them fighting over who got which tablet that I seriously thought about throwing them in the garbage and not looking back. I decided that they can only play with them on the weekends. During the school week, they go up there. There isn't much in the other basket, just a mesh laundry bag that we take with us on vacations.
On the wall next to the dryer I have the ironing board, plastic bag holder and my drying rack rests on the floor. Then there is a small garbage can and a fold up step stool. Finally, there is my candle and vases cabinet.
The large container on top of this cabinet contains electronics wires and extra chargers. This idea is straight from Alejandra's Home Organizing YouTube channel. You can watch that video here.
To add a little coziness to the room, I hung some pictures from our recent beach vacation. One is a picture of the kids on the beach and the other is all of our footprints in the sand. I also added a striped rug that I scored on clearance at TJMaxx. I suppose I could hide the plumbing and the outlets by adding a shelf and a cute curtain or something, but I am so used to it that I barely notice them anyway. Plus, that's another project that I am not interested in doing at the moment.
And that is the full tour of our organized laundry room. So many pictures for such a small space, but I hope you enjoyed it and are able to use some of these ideas!
