When we first moved into this house seven years ago, I knew that the laundry room was not ideal. Of course I would love a large room where I could separate all the colors of clothing, have a lovely countertop to fold it all, and a long, sturdy bar to hang-dry all my.....well, pretty much everything of mine gets air dried!!! But without a big renovation, I'm stuck with this "area!" This little room gets lots of traffic, as it's the only way to get to the garage from inside the house. This also means it's the first room we come to when we enter the house from the garage.
If you look beyond the heaping piles of clothes and clutter, you can see that it had nice cabinets above the washer and dryer. There was also a small utility sink with storage underneath. I added the bar for air-drying our clothes, as well as the two sets of hooks on the opposite wall. But the room was not working for us. WHAT A MESS!!!!!!!!
What I hated most about this laundry room:
1. There was no place to store laundry baskets
2. That utility sink was useless (we have a large one in the basement)
3. There was no storage for backpacks, winter stuff, etc.
I reeeeeeally wanted to just install beautiful built-in lockers and move the laundry upstairs somewhere. But that costs money. Actually, it would probably cost a A LOT of money! Not to mention, we'd have to give up a big section of our guest bedroom or renovate the master bathroom to get it done.
So after many months of brainstorming and planning, I came up with a fairly inexpensive solution. And after one year of living with the new and improved set-up, I can say that I am very, very glad we did it! It has worked great!!!!!!
First we removed that awful utility sink and cabinet.
We removed the cabinets and relocated them to the garage.
Then we stacked the washer and dryer by using a simple kit from Amazon.
The final step was to find a something that would hold the "stuff." We needed a place for all the laundry supplies, of course, but also: light bulbs, extension cords, backpacks, hats & gloves, the kids' socks...... I looked for weeks and weeks for the perfect piece that had a bench and hooks and cubbies. But in the end, we found this cabinet from IKEA!!! Over one year later, I have NO complaints about it!!!!
Here it is before we had the walls patched and painted. We also had to get a new washer and dryer a few months ago, so you may notice that in the photos at the end.
The shelves store light bulbs, extension cords, laundry and cleaning supplies, and laundry baskets. The kids each have a drawer for their socks and the other two drawers hold hats, gloves, scarves, etc. The bottom cubbies are perfect for backpacks, cheer bags, basketball bags, etc.!
I found the collapsible rod on Amazon, so now I have a great place to air dry all my jeans and sweaters.
At some point, I'd love to update the flooring, but for now, I'm just happy that the room is functional!
