The Great Laundry Room Overhaul

I like organization, utility and aesthetically pleasing spaces. My laundry room currently fails on all counts. We finally have a washer and dryer, but the rest of the space is a snarl of storage and empty cardboard boxes (apparently my sisters and I have separation anxiety with our moving boxes). It's a disaster.

Well, was a disaster. I should have taken a before picture, but I was on such a cleaning binge that I didn't stop to think (it happens...) and emptied most of the contents out into my family room. Just in the interest of being transparent about my faults and quirks, I'll admit that all the rubbish on the far couch are the empty boxes. Pathetic.

These shots below of the mostly empty laundry room itself represent about 3 hours of hard work, even though the reality is that it still looks like crap.

So how do I go from this to organization, utility and an aesthetically pleasing space? Let's start by identifying my goals:

• Utilize storage space - it's the ONLY space in the house - and keep easily access able
• Create hanging space for clothes to dry AND a 'coat closet' space
• Potentially create additional food storage space as our kitchen is limited
• Make it purty

Reasonable enough, right? Here's my plan:

created on www.floorplanner.com

The items in black currently exist... the red are what I want to build the week of Christmas. I'm still designing the shelving unit (and learning how to render it in SketchUp) but it will be simple: open frame with a top shelf, hanging rod and open space for clothes, then a bottom shelf with enough clearance beneath to put a standard height plastic storage tub. That's pretty much it! The small pantry unit is still in the theoretical phase and needs to pass the roommate approval committee.

I'll be digging through More Like Home's series 31 Days of 2x4 Projects for inspiration! Can't wait to have a few days off work to start building! In the meantime, I'll just keep cleaning.