My Laundry Room Storage Dilemmas: Solved!

We had a very productive weekend at our house.  

On Saturday, we cleaned and organized the garage so we could get ready for a project in our laundry room.  Huh?!  

Yes, we tackled the garage so we could prepare for tackling our laundry room.  I know that sounds weird and I’ll explain that more a little further down in the post.  

But first, I can’t wait to share my beautiful, organized and maximized laundry space with you today!  I finally solved my biggest storage, organization and space problems without doing  an expensive and major renovation. 

 We have a beautiful laundry space but, until this weekend,  it hasn’t functioned very well for us.  

The Problems:

#1.  Despite the fact that it has all the elements I desire in a laundry room — a sink, a space for a refrigerator and storage cabinets — the space is poorly designed.  I think most Texas homes lack storage space (we do not have basements) so the spaces that we do have need to be maximized and this room just didn’t do it for us (you’ll see why as you continue to read).

See that wall with the brooms and mops on it?  It juts out further than the cabinets because there is a water heater and major electrical cables behind it (thus making a renovation super expensive).  It encroaches on the dryer space and right there in that little corner under the brooms is where I had to keep the cat litter box.  (We have a fully enclosed litter box to keep the dogs out of it.)  It made it impossible to open the dryer door all the way much less put a laundry basket in front of the dryer.  

#2.  It’s a small space made worse by the aforementioned wall and the fact that the laundry room door gets in the way when a refrigerator is behind it.   

Until this weekend, we had a refrigerator back there.

The refrigerator stuck out about 3 inches beyond the counter and made the door swing into the room making it very difficult to fit a laundry basket while opening the front loader’s door to load and unload.  

This is how I would enter the room with a basket:  I would come in, holding the basket at a certain angle to get around the door, close the door, set the basket down, open the washer, slide the basket at a certain angle so the door would clear the basket, squat in a small space to load the washer.  All full baskets had to sit in the kitchen awaiting their turn in the laundry.  I have to confess, I think I would say “I hate this laundry room!” out loud at least once every time I did this dance. 

#3.  We are warehouse club shoppers which means we buy all kinds of things in bulk.  I mentioned this a year or so ago when I did my first laundry room organization post.  (You’ll see what a mess this room was before that post.)

We easily fill up all of the cabinets with toilet cleaner, big bottles of laundry detergent, toilet paper, etc.  As much as I tried to group things together, we would inevitably have to put some overflow up on top of the cabinets or in a cabinet in another room.

I can’t tell you how many times we thought we were out of paper towels, would then purchase a 12-pack of paper towels at the warehouse store and then come home to discover we still had 8 rolls stashed away somewhere else!

#4.  We rarely used our extra refrigerator.  My husband is an environmentalist and he hates to run an extra appliance.  So, we only plugged in our extra fridge during the holidays when we were freezing and storing a lot of extra food.  So, it was just taking up valuable space.  We did store extra drinks in there, but they weren’t refrigerated.

The Solution:

Here’s where the garage comes in to play:  We moved the extra fridge in to the garage.  We had to re-organize the garage a little bit, but with a some purging and re-arranging, it now fits in there perfectly and I think our garage is looking and functioning better than ever!

Moving the refrigerator opened up our laundry room so we could install this customizable shelving solution.

This single solution did so much for this room!

• The door now opens wider and gives me more floor space for laundry baskets and myself 
• We gained loads of extra storage space for all of our warehouse buys
• The litter box is now out of the way and enables me to not only open the dryer door, but I can easily fit a laundry basket where it’s needed

I am thrilled with how the space turned out.  Just look at all this storage!

 

The shelves are made by Elfa and I bought them at The Container Store.  I am not compensated by The Container Store, but am sharing because I am so happy with the product and the results.  

I think my favorite part that makes me totally geek out is the paper towel shelf.  It’s called a basket shelf and I put dividers in there to help keep the rolls standing up (thanks to the suggestion of a brilliant Elfa consultant). 

This shelf holds 18 rolls of paper towels – woo hoo!

I can now see everything I have, it is grouped together and it’s easy to reach.  Even my kids can get re-fills on toilet paper so there are no more excuses for no toilet paper in the bathroom.   

And, did you notice that the litter box is now out of sight and out of the way?

 

I love it!

I now have as much floor space as I can possibly have in this small room and I feel like every inch of this area is maximized.

I even have some empty cabinet space where I can put any overflow after a big trip to the warehouse store.

So, there you have it — my laundry room dilemmas solved!

This weekend’s big organizing frenzy made me think about how and why I organize the way I do so tomorrow I’ll share  my best storage and organizing tips.  I hope they’ll help you as you tackle some of your biggest organizing dilemmas.

Thanks so much for reading today!

 

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