After reading and admiring so many awesome laundry room posts I had to jump in and organize my laundry room. Here are some before pictures. Yes, there is dirty laundry on the floor and clean laundry hanging up. We are human!
Our house was built in 1980 and surprisingly they designed the house with some features we see in houses today like the laundry room on the second floor and 5 walk-in closets. Isn’t that unheard of for that year?
Be jealous! This house has lots of storage which is a great! I’m so fortunate! However, it can be a bad thing. Good thing because I can get organized, but it has been a bad thing because I haven’t the rooms and closets are messy and disorganized. Now it is the time to get organized! I’m so motivated now.
There are so many options for this small laundry room.
1. I could limit my detergent and laundry supplies and then make part of this a linen closet. Since we remodeled our master bathroom we don’t have a linen closet anymore. The reason I haven’t put linens in here is the lint from the dryer is pretty significant because in the winter we use the heat from the dryer in the house (see the box just over the dryer) and even with the filter we still have lint dust in the laundry room. I just store all of our linens in each room under the bed. It works.
2. Keeping most of the detergent and cleaning products in one room and away from the children. Storing the extra stuff in the basement.
3. I could add additional shelving so it could be both a place to keep my stockpile of detergent as well as the linen closet.
I’m thinking of sticking to option 2 for now it costs a lot less!
Here are some of the After pics. (I’m still adding some creative elements as I go along.)
I’ve created separate shelves for my supplies. All of the detergent and other harsh chemicals are out of reach of the children. Look at the top right and see that my detergent is exactly above the washer. Perfect pour right into the washer! Cleaning Supplies with the keep out of reach for children items are on the next shelf.
Stain Removers and Laundry Supplies are also out of reach of children.
Last but not least are my cleaning cloths like microfiber and dust cloths. The larger box still needs a label but is additional storage of cloths and toilet soft brushes.
Since I wanted to keep all of my cleaning supplies on hand but also out of reach of the kids I wanted boxes that fit the shelving but also also were heavy enough so they were hard to move. I discovered the wooden Prant boxes at IKEA and they are great. Doodle helped me build the boxes and had a blast doing it. She got to use the huge malt to hammer in the medal sides. I purchased 4 Prant boxes $6.99 each and 1 larger Prant box $9.99 each. Total Cost: $37.95
Fake Chalk Board labels!
Here I created some labels for my new IKEA Prant Boxes. I created these simply with my Cricut cutting out a couple designs using yellow for the background and black for the top piece. The yellow paper is 5 1/2 inches and the black paper is 4 inches. Then I used the glue dots. The perfect “chalk” was using my daughter’s Crayola Mini Twistables Crayons
I later decided I wanted some clothes pins so I could clip the labels on the boxes as well as use them for other craft projects. I found a package of 50 at Walmart for $.98. Cost: $.98
What do you think?
