Laundry: Moving & Organizing Shelves {Settled In September}

Yes. I’m going THERE.

The room we would all like to shut the door to and act like doesn’t exist. The place we air all our dirty laundry, literally. The Laundry Room.

I’ve always hated laundry rooms stuck between the kitchen and garage but since the majority of houses now have the layout set up this way, I kinda had to get over it. I’m sure there are a huge number of you with this same scenario. With this room basically a hallway between the garage and kitchen, I wanted it to function really well, have simple ways for me to keep it clean, as well as be slightly attractive.

I needed to be able to do laundry nightly, have adequate storage, as well as this not be terribly ugly to guest who come home with us via the garage. You know, no undies laying around, piles of sorting, or baby stained…whatever for them to sneak past acting as if they didn’t see it.

In order to accomplish this I had to enlist my hubs. But not for his normal assistance. This one had to be nearly ALL him. We have a long, decent sized laundry room which already had amazing, big, heavy shelving units hung on the wall. I chose to ask my hubs to move them…

Okay, you may be thinking the same things as my poor hubs and all his pals – she be crazy. “Move those up, that down, build what, and another huh?” Yeah, maybe a little nutty…but “moving the shelves” made my life TONS easier and this space a gazillion times more functional.

Here are the "in progress" pictures. These shelves were at a terrible height. They weren’t high enough to be for long term storage but they weren’t low enough to be used practically for daily storage items.

I’ve mentioned before, the world is not made for short people and at just 5’2” these shelves weren’t gonna cut it for my nightly laundry routine. I ask begged my husband to move the 1^st set of shelves lower to I could easily access the lowest shelf where I wanted to store my detergents and stuff.

I ended up having him also more the second set as high as they could go, eliminating the useless space above them and the unnatural space below them.

Now for the details of this shelf moving business. I decided to leave off the big heavy doors and go for open shelving. For me, open shelves MAKES me at least try and keep things organized and neat since everyone can see...everything. I also thought those hefty pieces of wood could better be used as shelving in the garage in the long run. Painting them white {simple simi-gloss, not tinted, can of random we already had} made the room look brighter, cleaner, and larger as well.

Temporary clean basket storage and "mud room"Well, that the huge progress we made just by moving and painting the shelves!

Here is the cleaning supply shelf; the one I had Matt lower:

Lowest Shelf: detergent, color catchers, fabric softener, drier sheets, pic, fuzz-buster, and other random cleaning tools in a basket
Middle Shelf: sprays for stains, tub of air fresheners, tub of window & floor cleaner, swiffer pads, tub of other cleaners
Top Shelf: bin of fabric scraps, sewing box, bin of other sewing things, ribbon organizer, basket of loose toilet paper
Above Shelf: basket of "mending" to be done, sewing machine, basket of paper towels

Here is the longer term storage shelving I had Matt raise:

Bottom Shelf: giant trash bags, iron, tissue, shelf liner, brown paper bags, party napkins, wet ones, everyday napkins
Middle Shelf: Sewing Machine, iron {don't ask...we don't even iron}, toilet paper
Top Shelf: big boxes/bottles of cleaners, hubs random protein powders, poly-fil

In the next few days, I'll share the other project that came about in the overall "vision" for this space to make it function to its fullest potential: