The Laundry Room: Making it work

Hello everybody! Hope your week is going well! I can hardly believe it’s Thursday already. Crazy pants.

I’ve been working on purging the basement (you can see one of my big projects earlier this week here) and it was when I moved on to the laundry room that I realized I haven’t shared progress in here since last year.

It’s been a year since I’ve blogged about this space when I built the shelf behind the washer and dryer:

When we got the new set I knew I wanted a top loading washer, so the little shelf along the back gives us a spot for some items we need within reach and it hides all the ugly stuff behind the set. :) 

But we’ve made some updates to make this a more functional space over the past year and although the room is still very much in between, I wanted to share some of them!

The room is smaller than we originally planned -- we had to work with beams in the basement so this room get a little tighter. It’s just over eight by five feet, which is still a dream compared to the mud/laundry room space we had upstairs before. A DREAM.

But with the washer and dryer taking up most of that space and a door to the storage room, I’ve had to be smart about storage and any additions in here.

We’ve always used one of those wooden drying racks that you open up on the floor, but this hanging rack from IKEA works just as well (and takes up way less space!):

I wanted small laundry baskets that would stay in here all the time and last year I found ADORABLE polka dotted ones at the container store:

One for lights, one for darks. It’s so great to just grab one and just dump it in the laundry. And they’re tall and skinny so they fit perfectly right next to the dryer.

I’ve added some storage in here so the shelf behind the washer and dryer only holds the necessities now. My glass jar for the detergent and a little box hides the dryer sheets:

 

I like the necessities to be cute, alright? :)

We moved the ironing board down here and it hangs next to the door:

We set it up right outside in the family room and watch TV while ironing. It makes it suck a little less. ;)

You can see a lot of the to do’s in the photo above – I installed that cabinet to use some of the awkward space in here and it needs to be finished up. I have ideas for the wall above it too. The storage room door needs to be painted (it will be black like the rest of the doors) and the trim all needs to be painted too.

One thing I did to help make this room a little bigger when we finished the space was to push it out to the family room area just a bit more than planned (to the right):

That allowed me to put double doors on the room instead of a standard door. I LOVE it – I can easily carry baskets or armfuls of laundry through the door without banging into them. (And yes, they still need hardware. On the list.)

I still love love love the hexagon tile we put in here – it was so inexpensive and looks great. It is chilly on bare feet though so I have small mats in front of the washer and dryer:

I’m always looking for one rug that would be the right size/color but it’s hard to find. These get dirty really easily so I don’t think they’ll stay forever.

And obviously we installed two small cabinets on the wall (that need to be painted) – I didn’t want it to be all cabinets and I didn’t want just shelving (I wanted some of the stuff to be out of sight), so we went with two. Initially I was planning on hanging a rod between them to hang clothes but quickly realized I didn’t want to look at that all the time. (And we really don’t keep clothes down here.)

So now I’m planning a mix of both hidden and open storage – shelves between the two cabinets. I’m also planning on bringing in more color to this space and doing some kind of treatment to that wall. Haven’t decided just what yet.

There’s still so much I want to do but it’s already wonderfully functional and it’s come a long way from how it looked just over a year ago:

Compared to how it looks now:

And yes…a year later I still LOVE having a laundry room in the basement. It was the right move for us but it may not be for everyone.

Do you have a big laundry room? Is it combined with your mud room or does it stand alone? This one is way bigger than the space we had in our old mud/laundry combo but I’m still always trying to use every bit of it as best as I can.