I Heart Laundry Room Organization

 I hope you get a second you'll pop over to I Heart Organizing where I'm guest posting all about our Laundry Room organization!

From the counter top tray, to the piggy bank! It's all happening Today! ;)

I hope you'll check it out! I have some new clear laundry bottles (that are actually old Milk Bottles from Whole Foods), as I mentioned before a new tray and of course a little piggy bank for all the Husbands change (what is with husbands and carrying TONS of change?).

Laundry Room Pocket!

If you caught our Take-Out menu organization post earlier this week, you would have read that I was going back to Staples to buy another one of Martha's Plastic Pockets . . . I wasn't joking. I went straight out and bought another one, a bigger one.

And I hung it in our Laundry Room Cabinet.

There is NO better place to store your Washing Machine and Dryer Manuals then right where you would use them. If our laundry machines weren't enclosed by a cabinet and legs I might have considered sticking the pocket to the side of the machines and storing them there! But I think they're just as great in the cabinet and actually more accessible too!

While it is super functional to store them right above the machines, it's not super attractive or useful for day to day use, so I quickly printed out Martha Stewart's Stain Removal Guide and slipped it in there, in front of the manuals. And having a stain removal guide at your fingertips is pretty darn handy too!

For some reason having the manuals right where they should be gives me tons of happiness and just plain makes me feel good. I think that's what organizing is suppose to do . . . make you feel good!

Laundry Room Reveal

I have no more excuses for dirty laundry!! Thanks to Lee I now have the cutest darn Laundry room on the block!! :)
This laundry room has been a year in the making! I'm glad it took that long I think I needed to LIVE in the space for a while figure out how it would function best (for example, a year ago I wouldn't have thought to make a space for hanging wet laundry). Also the water supply hoses were causing me a serious issue . . . how best to cover them . . . attractively!
And the budget . . . don't get me started, $200 for an entire laundry room . . . Phew!

Here's where we started:

Here's where we ended up:

I'm IN LOVE with my new laundry room! The counter is perfect for folding laundry on, and in perfect view of the T.V. (a very important part of laundry folding). The bar is perfect height for hanging Lee's shirts on (you can see his shirts sit just above the counter).
My Favorite part would have to be the posts that hold the counter up . . . a $10 find from a salvage store (Surrey New and Used) earlier this summer, they were originally Dark Brown, Lee sanded them then spray painted them in a matte white! He used spray paint "because it would give a more even finish."

Alternate View:

Because wet laundry was going to be hanging near the wall we wanted to protect it from moisture so Bead Board was perfect. We bought a small piece from Home Depot already painted and sealed for $10!! Protected wall and cute accent . . . win win!
To save money we kept the same cabinet that was there before and just bought new cabinet doors for it. We picked out Adel Doors from Ikea, they should have been $28.00 each but we found them in the AS-IS section for . . . $10.00  Wooo to the Hooo!

With the laundry room being so small we had to squeak out every bit of possible storage so instead of just running some crown around the top we added an actual top made out of MDF, so I could store some baskets and maybe a little extra "Costco Storage" * see definition below.

"Costco Storage"- What is needed the moment after a big costco shopping trip when you have filled your cabinets to the brim and your counter is still full of large awkwardly packaged food, then you either leave the food on the counter or desperately try to hide it in the pot drawer!

So instead of using crown molding we used Chair Rail! It was thicker and sturdier than Crown would have been!

For the bar we used a shower rod in Chrome. We chose a shower rod because it would hold a lot of weight  (a wet XXL sweat shirt weighs a lot). And we chose chrome because it matched the chrome in the washing machines :).

For the light, I found this beauty at Homesense for . . . $38! I liked how it was a mini version of our dining room light! And because we have 9 foot ceilings in the laundry room we needed something to hang down a fill the space!!

And last for the door handles I wanted something SUPER minimal, in fact for a while I was thinking that I did even want to put handles on the doors, but I found these at Ikea on sale for $3.99 and they were chrome which matched the chrome from the bar, and the chrome in the washing machine . . . that's win win win!

So there it is!!! The New and Improved Laundry Facility!! :)

And just in case you're feeling the urge to invest in a couple of Blue Laundry Machines, ours are made by LG and are in the super fashionable Bahama Blue! :)

Budget Breakdown:

Counter Top (Ikea's Pragel)              $80

Doors (Ikea's Adel) $10 ea.               $20

Cabinet                                              Free

Paint for Trim and Legs                    Free leftover from previous project

6 feet of Chair Rail @  $1.47 a foot  $ 9

Posts for counter to sit on  $10 ea.    $20

1 Sheet MDF                                     $30

Door Handles                                     $ 4

Shower Rod                                       $10

Shower Rod Hardware                      $ 4

Bead Board                                        $10

Hangers (Ikea)                                   $ 7

Light  (Homesense)                           $38

_____________________________________

                   TOTAL:                       $232   aaaaaaaahhhhhhhhh so close!!!!!

Laundry Room: Ironing Board LOVE!

I wish I could open this post, by declaring my well thought out design plan for the laundry room, something like "I always planned on buying a crazy ironing board cover, that had the exact color of our laundry machines in it" but really I was shopping for Dr.Pepper Cherry in Target and while browsing I came across this fabulous cover for around $10. It was bright, fun and like I said before it has the exact color of our washer and dryer in it!

It's made by room essentials . . . you can't miss it, it's in a big orange package. And like I said it's was somewhere around $10, I can't find my receipt (sorry!). I hope you like it as much as I do. I thought a boring room like a laundry room could use a little whimsy!!

A large hook later and our laundry room corner went from this:

To this:

The view from the Dinning Room:

Hopefully this weekend we'll be tackling the last of the laundry room to do's, we have to put a counter on top of our machines, should be fun :) hehe As always, we'll let you know how it goes ;)

Linen Closet Organized

Seriously, what is it about linen closets that make them junk magnets?? Maybe it's the fact that they are meant to hold sheets, and folding fitted sheets is horrible, and so it makes you give up on the whole closet?? who knows!
But I'm so excited to show you our newly organized linen closet, folded fitted sheets and all :)

If you missed our Linen Closet Progress post, here's what the closet looked like before:

And here's what it looks like after:

We painted the closet walls "Geyser" by Martha Stewart. I wanted something a bit darker and more dramatic. I love the way it looks with the wall color and the trim color. Painting the insides of closets is my favorite thing to do. It's such a surprise every time you open the door.

Lee installed solid shelves, I just like solid shelving better! We have wire shelving in our front hall closet and it works really well for shoes and dirty soles. But everything that's going into the linen closet is clean, so we had the option to choose more attractive shelving.
We ran wood around the perimeter of the closet, then cut the shelves to fit and screwed them into place.

We absolutely needed to make room for the vacuum. As much as I wanted to have pretty shelves with beautifully folded sheets and towels, filling the whole closet, we HAD to fit in the vacuum (function wins over beauty every time here) and lost a lot of space but we had no choice. We were able to squeak out  a bit more storage, Lee installed two small shelves just big enough to hold to baskets from Ikea. In the top basket is where I keep the "Fall/Winter" touches for around the house, the lamb skin throws and fuzzy blanket. And the bottom basket is where I keep all of the throw pillow covers, we have summer ones and winter ones and fall ones and since I started sewing we've had A LOT more :)

Under the baskets is Max's Crate, I was going to take it out for the picture but this is reality blogging and in reality we have to store his crate somewhere. Lee made sure to leave just enough space for the crate and the vacuum attachments.

I had a friend over the yesterday for coffee and she wanted to get "the inside scoop" on today's post, so I took her upstairs and showed her the linen closet and her reaction was "where are all your sheets?" So I thought you might be wondering the same. We only have 2 sets of bed sheets for our bed, our white organic sheets, and a set of organic flannel sheets for the winter (p.s. organic flannel is expensive, next time I might just opt for regular flannel :). I don't think we need anymore than that. Once a week I wash the sheets, then put them right back on (well, I really wait for Lee to get home so he can put the fitted sheet on for me :). We all have sheet sets in our linen closet sitting there getting musty, I like things simple and to me simple is 2 sets of sheets :) But I wouldn't go fewer than 2 sets in case of emergency, we've had to spend a hot summer night on flannel sheets before because Max thought grass was his main course for the night!

So there's our super duper newly organized linen closet.

*If you look at the top of the linen closet, there's a space for future quilts this amateur quilter (me) will be quilting :) Always Plan Ahead!! haha

Linen Closet Progress

I'm made some good progress on the linen closet yesterday!
Here's where we started:

Here's after shelf supports:

With Shelves and paint (Martha Stewart's Geyser):

With luck it will be raining this weekend  and we can finish up, it needs a few more shelves, and a spot for the vacuum (easier said then done, finding a spot for the vacuum and still making good use of the space in the linen closet isn't super easy).

Laundry Day

Our Laundry room is finally done, after much blood, sweat and tears, and I do mean all of those literally, although the tears are a result of the blood (on my part, not Lee's), word to the wise, sharp metal = hurty. Moving on, I hope you like it, here's what we did.

First we Lee removed the washer and dryer, kinda necessary in order to paint, although my dad would make the argument to paint around it :) (Love ya Dad).

Once they were out we cleaned the wall with warm water and a cloth, you should have seen the dust and lint that accumulated behind there, okay, I'll show you the picture, if only to inspire us all to vacuum behind our dryers more often (I've turned into the vacuum police).

Ours was last vacuumed out, just under a year ago, when we replaced our broken washer and dryer with the newer, slightly used model you see here.
Next we taped off some large stripes (apparently my new favorite thing to do).
 Painted in those stripes a yellowy color , I thought about painting a bright vibrant color, like the Mudroom, but Lee vetoed Hot Pink, or Fushia as I tried to sell it, and we both settled on Yellow.

The chrome baskets on top of the dryer hold, the dryer balls (the chemical free way to fluff you laundry), and dog towels. I put non slip pads on the bottom of the baskets so they don't slide around and scratch up the finish. And as a bonus they are the matching baskets to the ones in the bathroom holding our extra towels, the bathroom and laundry room are very close to each other and I thought it would be good to have a little continuity.

We bought this ironing board holder from Kmart, it's fantastic. It holds the board up and out of the way, it also hold the iron on top with a spot to coil the cord, keeping it all nice and tidy, and it has two spaces to store spray bottles, I keep our stain remover in one spot and our lavender scented linen spray in the other.

 I also keep a luggage rack tucked beside the machines so that I don't have to bend so far down when doing the laundry, it makes folding straight out of the dryer a breeze!

Laundry Room Mini Project, completed, I was even a little excited to do my first load of laundry in the new Laundry Room Closet.

 Max likes Laundry too now, and could wait to get his freshly laundered toy out of the basket :)

This photo best illustrates his efforts to dig to the bottom for Elmer Elephant.

To find out the recipe for our homemade laundry detergent follow the link.