Tiny Laundry Room Reorganization



This summer I made a few changes to my very small laundry room to make it a little more functional for our large family.  This laundry room reorganization has made a big difference and has made tackling laundry for a large family much easier.  I apologize for the quality of the pictures in this post, there is absolutely no natural light in our laundry room and it is so small, it is hard to get pictures from good angles.

First - - the before:


I had one shelf in this room for storage and it was way too high to be easily accessible.


We had a door into this room that took up a whole lot of valuable wall space.



We removed the door from this room and put nice molding around the door frame.  This allowed us to make room for sorting bins along that wall.  I found some tall laundry baskets and then just used vinyl on the wall behind each of them to help everyone know where to put their dirty laundry. The boys are still learning how this works, but it is getting better and better all the time.


Next to the sorting bins, I have a bookcase that holds large bins for each of my boys' clean clothes.  Once I fold their clean clothes, I put them in their labeled bins and then they take them to their rooms and put them away as part of their daily chores.  We have had this system in place for several months and it works great!!


I labeled each of the boys' bins with a wood cut-out that I painted green and then cut their names out of vinyl and applied them to the wood.  The cut-outs are attached to the bins with glue.


We installed three shelves over the washer. The bottom two are much more easily accessed than the one before.  The top one is tougher to get to, but I store stuff up there that I don't need regularly.  It is nice to have gained a lot more storage space in this room.  I also "went shopping" around my house for some prettier containers to hold my laundry supplies.  And because I get asked all the time - I will just tell you - the tennis balls are thrown in my dryer with my pillows and duvets that have been washed.


We installed a small closet rod between the top shelf and the wall to allow me to easily hang up stuff that I don't want to put in the dryer, or clothes that need to be hung immediately out of the dryer.

We also painted the walls in this room a soft blue-gray with white trim.  I love the colors!!  I wish these pictures did them justice.

And now, for a couple of final looks at this room from the doorway . . .


 
Making this room over has been one of the best things I have done to this house in a long time.  It was worth all the time and the minimal amount of money we had to put into it. The laundry room is so much more functional for our family, and it is a much more pleasant place for me to work.