Laundry Room Love

Ironically, my laundry room is one of my favorite spaces in my house, despite my hatred for the actual task of doing laundry.


I say this because it's one of the few rooms where everything has a perfect little place, and I know exactly where to find just what I need. The rest of the house is still obsessively organized - don't get me wrong - but I'm still in the process of beautifying my organization systems so they are visually pleasing and blend with my décor.


So without further ado, here's a peek into the method behind my madness:

This room is right at the top of our stairs, so it has to look nice because it's the first thing people see when they go upstairs. You can't really tell in the picture, but the walls are a very soft blue. We also have a closet behind the door, which is being used to store extra bed linens, gift wrapping supplies, and Space Bags filled with extra pillows and things. I am not showing you yet, because it's a mess and on my to-do list of organizing!


My goal here was to eliminate "dead space." So, we installed these cabinets purchased on sale from Home Depot, and I screwed in some cute door pulls. Then, I found these black canvas storage bins on clearance at Target, perfect for extra storage above the cabinets! Finally, I pushed the washer and dryer apart so I could store our laundry detergent, dryer sheets, wastebasket and a mini step-stool in the storage cart between them.

Here is the best part: the organization! I just corralled everything into these little bins and made labels for each one. The blue ones were from the Dollar Tree, the white ones were from Save Mart and the wicker ones were from Target on clearance!

The left cabinet holds bins labeled "cleaning products" and "pet odor & carpet care." I don't have a label maker yet, or any fancy crafty stuff to make the labels look cuter, but I did have some leftover place cards from the Dollar Tree from a previous project. So I just used a silver Sharpie and labeled away.

I used the same idea here, and just used double-sided tape to label which towels go where. I'm kind of against folding towels all perfectly, when you're just going to use them anyway, so these baskets are just perfect to toss my small towels and rags into very easily.

The right cabinet has bins for "ironing & uniform care" (for my husband) and "swiffer pads & wipes." I like to keep things like starch, shoe shining stuff, safety pins, iron-on hem tape (my favorite!) and other ironing-related things together.

I also labeled these baskets for all of our extra stuff. We keep our cat food and litter box in the laundry room, so we have a bunch of cat stuff in one basket, and then we've got baskets for our vacuum stuff and other miscellaneous cleaning supplies like sponges, scrubbies, extra spray bottles, etc.

Behind the door, I used an over-the-door coat hanger for my Swiffers and my ironing board. The giant baby bottle is actually a piggy bank that I got at my baby shower a couple of weeks ago. It was filled with Hershey's Kisses which are now mysteriously gone, but that's neither here nor there :) My point is, I plan to use it for coins I pull out of pockets when I'm doing laundry. I just threw it on the laundry cart so it's handy when I need it!


Well, that's pretty much it for now. My next project will be tackling the closet on the other side of the room, so hopefully I'll be posting about that soon. And I want to get a few hampers for whites, darks and colors, because we currently just sort them into piles from our closet hamper. But with the baby coming, I know laundry will start piling up faster!


But for now, thanks for stopping my and not laughing at how much I love my laundry room!