I really shouldn’t call my laundry room a laundry room because it serves so many other purposes. As a matter of fact all of the drawers and cabinets don’t even store anything laundry related. The only place I store laundry related items such as: extra detergent, stain remover, dryer sheets, etc. is inside the pedestal drawers underneath the units themselves. The rest of the Ikea cabinets and drawers are designated to house other non-laundry items. Before designing this room, I made a list of all the things that I would want to store and then I started to research my options of how best to do this. Finally, when I finished my design it was time to fill them up and here’s a peek inside:
Swimsuits, Towels, and Beach Gear
We are fortunate enough to live a half-mile from the beach and because of this sand gets tracked everywhere in the house. The laundry room is the perfect place to shake out the items, throw directly into the washer and then store in baskets right in the laundry room. And, less items to take upstairs and put away. The pull-out drawers make it easy for the kids to access their swimsuits and towels.
Beach/Pool Bags
On the back of the laundry room door, are two hooks which store a beach bag AND a pool bag. Yes, I’m crazy like that! I like the bottom bag to be used at the beach because it can easily be washed out. The LL Bean bag is the perfect size for the pool but would get so dirty if it made a trip to the beach. I used command hooks to hang these bags rather than nailing into the door.
Craft Drawer
I’m not really sure I can call this a craft drawer but I don’t know how else to describe it. If you remeber from this post I have a ‘junk drawer’ upstairs in the kitchen, so this drawer is filled with things I still want stored in the house but I don’t necessarily use them on a daily basis. It’s a hodge podge of random things and it changes constantly.
Tool Drawer
This drawer is full of my essential tools that I would need to hang a photo or some other small job. You will notice there are three plug-in timers in this drawer….to be honest, I don’t know why we have three. And why all of the curtain hooks? For some reason I can’t seem to part with them. See, I even need to re-organize from time to time!
Wrapping Station
When designing my laundry room the only thing I KNEW I had to have was a wrapping paper drawer and wrapping station. I love to wrap gifts and thought the laundry room would be a perfect space since it would have plenty of countertop to spread out on. Wrapping gifts is now a breeze since everything is at my fingertips. Also, I made sure my Ikea drawers were plenty wide enough to contain even the longest roll of wrapping paper. The best thing is I always have wrapping paper at my fingertips and no more running out to get paper to wrap a last minute birthday gift.
Sports Uniforms
Before I designated this drawer for storing sports uniforms I can’t tell you how much time we wasted looking for ballet leotards, t-ball pants, hockey jerseys, etc. It seems that the uniforms always got washed in a timely manner but when they got put back in their rooms, the uniforms became lost! So I decided to keep these all in the laundry room so each child would know exactly where to look. Also, it was less laundry (full confession here–my husband does the laundry!) I had to carry upstairs. Now the kids know exactly where to go to get their uniforms and NO more looking around the house.
Internet and phone ‘junk’
Everyone has to store these items somewhere in their house. I chose to store them behind the laundry room door on these shelves from Ikea (they can be cut to any size). I put the shelves up high and had an outlet installed high instead of low plug-ins, after all you never know when your basement will flood in the midwest or little hands will try pulling things out of the wall.
I realize not everyone is obsessed with a label maker or has the desire to have all of their baskets match, but the point of this post is to help you imagine the possiblities of how to group and store like items together to make your life easier. Even if you contain everything in one giant basket, like the sports uniforms for example, if they are together it will be easier to find them than hunting them down once they go into the kid’s rooms. The key to organization is thinking about your challenges and then coming up with solutions to streamline things.
