My Summer Vacation cont...The Laundry Room

Do you have a room that causes a sinking feeling in the pit of your stomach and every time you open the door you just want to run and hide? I have felt this way about our laundry room since we moved in.

 It measures all of 5 1/2 x 6 and has two doors, one going to the family room and one going to the garage. From the garage it gets shoes and boots, hats, jackets, gloves, dirt, lint, saw dust, backpacks and more. From the family room it gets dirty rags thrown on the floor and all the stuff that no one knows what to do with. I this room we store light bulbs, wrapping paper and gift bags, Costco packs of toilet paper, kleenex, paper towels, three cowboy hats, the hot plate we take to hotels so we can make our own breakfast, cloth grocery bags, the high chair I keep for the grandkids, stamps that I use occasionally and of course the usual laundry stuff.

We got a shoe organizer, put up hooks and shelves above the cupboards and across the other wall. Mark put up a bar for hanging up wet clothes. I organized and reorganized and rearranged the stuff in the cupboards trying to find something that works but in the end I could never really reach any of the upper shelves without getting a chair from the kitchen and the pile on the dryer just grew until it would all fall down.

Just inside the family room I created a place for back packs and school books and relocating that stuff  helped some, but in between major cleaning efforts and reorganizing the laundry room looked like this...

(I can't find my before picture)

After I joined Pinterest I began to see all kinds of ways to decorate and organize a laundry room and I began to dream and plan...

Someday... 

in the far distant future... 

when our washer and/or dryer died

 my laundry room would no longer be the armpit of the house.

And then one day I was washing a load of tennis shoes to help with an eagle project and it happened...
a size 14 tennis shoe wedged itself between the agitator and the inside of the washer
(even though I did all I could to prevent it) and, well...
may my old washer rest in peace...

Having paved the way from my new laundry room:
still so small it was hard to get a picture where you could see most of it all in one shot.

Ikea cupboard I love you!

View from family room - garage to right

View from garage

 
New from top
(How many packs of Costco TP? the world may never know.)
to bottom
(John, who did my tile got into the decorating and painted my drain cover black!)

storage for brooms, mops and folding step stool

 
Funny how excited I was to have a step stool so I could reach everything in seconds, now that I have a space to store it.

There is no divider in the bottom of the cupboard so I can fit the high chair, my large cutting mat for sewing and my laundry basket ... you can actually open the door to the garage  WHILE I'm doing laundry...
who'da thought that was possible?!

I want to go out and buy more toilet paper just because I have a great place to store it!

While I will not say that I suddenly I LOVE to do laundry and this probably is not my FAVORITE room in the house, I have to admit that when I open the door, this room makes me happy. I don't mind being in here, in fact I kind of like it. I don't cringe at the possibility that someone will enter my home through this room.

My laundry room is still very small but it's functioning so wonderfully!

labeled and accessible storage with towel bar for hanging

Need a light bulb or wrapping paper? 

I can have it for you in two seconds, without causing an avalanche!

precision spacing so that all doors open without hitting anything 

I like this room enough that I will put hanging things away quickly,
and even iron rather than let them hang there and block my "window".

And the stackable washer and dryer... GENIUS.
I guess there are all kinds of blessings that come from helping others.