Small Laundry Room Makeover

Laundry, laundry laundry. It is certainly time for a laundry room makeover in my house. The never ending task that continues to plague us and will never go away. When I was growing up our laundry was in the basement. This was pretty cool as a kid because we had a fun laundry shoot that went from the upstairs bathroom all the way down to the basement. There was even a little door off of the kitchen that we could look into and intercept what was falling through just for amusement. The basement also offered adequate space for all of the additional laundry room peripherals. There was certainly some convenience to that, though now as an adult, I don’t quite love the idea of my parents having to navigate all of the stairs.

When it comes to laundry room design it seems a lot of the homes being built today offer a mudroom that in many cases are large enough to house a washer and dryer, making maneuverability a breeze. Some homes are even designed with the washer and dryer upstairs where the bedrooms are located which make it even easier to do the laundry and distribute straight to the appropriate rooms.

Our house has a small laundry room on the main floor. We purchased the house as is and this is apparently what the first home owner went with when the house was built. Additionally, the laundry room came with one ugly shelf. I think it’s a Rubbermaid shelf and I am not a fan of those. Why do builders put that cheap unsightly shelf right in the middle of the wall in a room or closet, making the surrounding space often unable to be appropriately utilized?

Laundry Room Makeover

That one shelf was holding everything. And what didn’t fit on the shelf would often overflow onto the washing machine.

There was just no room. The round hamper was even too big for the space. It was always a battle trying to open the dryer, the space was simply not functional. And don’t think that I’m blind to this electric green color. This color was yet another newbie painter color mistake that we made a while ago. Though it was also a complete fail, I preferred it over the horrible yellowish dusty builder grade paint that is often put in homes.

Back to the lack of storage, I decided that a cabinet is what I needed to make the space more efficient and also hide any unsightly disorder. I ventured onto the marketplace and came across two perfect large cabinets, we purchased one and were well on our way. In order to get the cabinet installed, my super handy husband quickly built a stand to hold the cabinet high enough in order to get it screwed into the wall.

Laundry Room Cabinet

The cabinet alone makes a world of difference, the room already looks cleaner. We pretty much just tossed the items into the cabinet until a plan of order was developed. We even added a couple shelves to the right of the cabinet for added storage.

Time To Organize

{Another post you might like: Small Bathroom Makeover}

Transforming our home was such a labor of love for Chris and I. He was phenomenal at everything he did.

Everything halted for so long, and getting anything done now takes a ton longer of course. So this cabinet sat in a state of chaos and the room remained the unsightly green until recently. The first thing that I did was paint the room Edgecomb Gray by Benjamin Moore. I needed the room to be light and airy.

Such a refreshing next step but the room was still crowded and every time I opened the cabinet I felt entirely overwhelmed, there was always an extension cord dangling or a vacuum part tumbling out. SO ANNOYING!

I decided it was time to assess exactly what I was keeping in the cabinets. It was time to continue with this laundry room makeover. When I took it all out, it was insane to see just how much stuff was in there. The cabinet had become a catch all for items that were needed but didn’t quite have a home.

There was just so much stuff!

And it continued

I didn’t have an exact plan of how to rectify the crazy but I knew that I needed to corral ‘like’ items in an organized fashion. ENTER AMAZON! I ordered these baskets:

Cotton Rope Baskets