Organized 31

Ideas from a Military Mom

More Laundry Room Tinkering

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Hi, I’m Susan and I battle with laundry room envy when I look at pictures of gorgeous laundry rooms that other folks have DIYed.  Our current laundry room leaves me very unsatisfied.  I’ve beaten my head against the wall with this laundry room for the past 2 years and all to no avail.

Issue 1
It’s ridiculously tiny and awkwardly shaped.  You have to walk through it to get from the garage into the house.  But the walk-though is L-shaped and narrow, so narrow that if you walk through with a shopping bag, you’ll hook the washer door EVERY time.  And when Mommy, Daddy and the 3 little ducklings are walking into the house or running out because we’re late, please, don’t let anyone forget something and turn around.  If you do, there will be a traffic jam like in an apocalyptic movie.  And all the chaotic traffic jam occurs in my teensy laundry room.

Since we’re renting and likely to get orders on the Air Force’s whim at any time, I accept that I can’t change the size or layout of the laundry room.

Issue 2
Next, is the fact that the dryer was previously stacked on top of the washer (pre-us moving in) so there’s sticky tape residue on the top of the washer.  I’ve tried scrapping it off, but it would take hours and hours.  To be honest, I don’t want to invest hours and hours of my time on a rental house.



Solution – a $2 vinyl tablecloth in the most cheerful color I could find because the laundry room is also very dark with no window.

Practical improvement for little effort and little cost.
 
 
                                       
 
 
Issue 3 
There’s no room for a storage cabinet or shelving.  There is only the existing wire shelf.  It is so high  that I can barely reach it on my tip toes.  Because we don’t know how long we’ll be stationed here, I don’t want to spend any time or money on adding better shelving to a temporary house.  27 moves with 5 of them in 6 years, will do that to ya.  So I’m living with the one too high wire shelf.
                                                     Although my “stuff” was organized in bins and baskets, it depressed me because it was in  hodge podge of containers.   I didn’t want to go out and buy pretty baskets that wouldn’t fit in our next house, so I decided to make something that would work for us here and now, for however long that is, without spending more than a couple of dollars.
 
                                                           I grabbed 2 Costco sized boxes, one  with handles and one without.  I dug through the discounted fabric bin at JoAnn’s and found blackout fabric that was the perfect weight ….. and price.  I chose the  off-white color fabric so that the boxes would help make the tiny area less visually cluttered.  I used spray adhesive to attach it to the boxes.                                          
 
And, voila!
 

 
 
 
Let’s see it all put together.
 
 
1.  One box holds laundry mesh bags and dryer sheets.  The other box holds dusters, sponges, and cleaning tools. 
2.  Basket holds sunscreens, bug sprays and the Grab n’ Go box.   Got the basket for $.50 at the thrift store.
3.  Anything with drip potential, like detergent bottles,  are kept on a plastic tray that I already had.
4.  Wire basket holds hand towels for the nearby powder room that doesn’t have any storage space of its own.
5.  Repurposed Clorox wipes container hold plastic shopping bags.
6.  2 dish tubs that used to store toddler toys a long time ago, now hold items that need to be washed.  Our hampers are all upstairs and these are items that are generated downstairs; one for dish towels and one for sports clothes.
7.  My solution to the yucky sticky tape residue on the top of the washer was to put the vinyl table cloth down.  It covers the sticky parts and is easy to wipe up.
8.  A drawer from a set of rolling plastic drawers that got broken in the move now holds rags.
 
Not too bad for an out of pocket expense of about $6.  And everything is non-permanent so as soon as we get orders, we’ll be ready to go where ever the Air Force sends us.

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  1. I think it looks great and you solved the space problem very well. I’m in a very similar situation, in my case I share the laundry room with a bathroom, which is all kinds of weird. What happened is that we have two bathrooms in the apartment (even if it’s a very small apartment, we still got two of them for some reason), so we removed the shower in one, to put the washing machine there, which before was in the kitchen. It’s more practical because having the laundry area in the kitchen wasn’t really comfortable at all, and we even gained on space, but of course we can only afford to have one shelf on top of it because there’s no more free space. I’ll end up doing something similar to what you did. Great job!

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    • Good to know I’m not the only one 🙂 I’m particularly happy I didn’t spend much since the week after, the landlord notified me he’s replacing the washer and dryer with a stackable unit! Well, I’ll enjoy this while it lasts and then see what I can do to the new arrangement.

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  3. I am blown away by the organization and ideas here. I love the paper towel holder!! Now I’m going to go through all your old posts to get even more ideas! THANKS! 🙂

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