Day 5 - Laundry Room

Welcome back to Day 5 of a 31 Day series on a Clutter Free Home. Today I will be revealing details of the Laundry Room.

Over the course of about a year we slowly remodeled our Laundry Room. The reason it took so long is that we did some major things such as building a closet around the water softener, (having a baby!), replacing water damaged subflooring, relocating plumbing from the middle of the room to behind the wall (like in most homes...not sure why it wasn't there to begin with), etc. This is what the floor used to look like.

See all those holes? Those are the former locations of our water supply and drain for the washing machine, etc. What kind of plumber or DIY-er puts the pipes 2 ft away from the wall??? Beats me.

Here are a few more BEFORE PICS. We had installed that handy dandy little white shelf under the cabinets and it sat just above the washer/dryer. The problem had always been that we would set things down as we walked in the door on top of the washer/dryer. So I got the genius idea of installing that shelf so that we could put things up there instead and I wouldn't have to spend 10 minutes clearing off the appliances just to use them. I liked that fact...but it always looked a bit messy (and I'm more of a keep-things-behind-closed cabinet doors kinda gal.) Still, some of you may think that's a fun clutter-busting idea for your home. A place to put things when you walk in the door that won't prevent you from doing something else.

And here's my handsome hubby relishing the fact that all our plumbing is now tucked neatly INSIDE the walls:

And then we lived with this set up for probably 6 months...Yuck. Whatever you do, don't drop clean clothes on the floor on the way to the dryer.

So, anyways, when all that was done, we removed the border, repaired the drywall and then re-painted. We also installed a new exterior door.

We chose the color "Bay Sands" by Valspar. It is a very pale blue, almost gray color. It just looks very clean. I welcomed that after all that remodeling dirt we'd been living in.

We re-used some of our old white stock laminate cabinets from the room and just changed out the hardware and added a little bit of crown molding to the top to dress them up. We sold the rest of the cabinets on Craigslist.

We also tiled the floor with 16" square travertine tiles. And we replaced the old finnicky track lighting with a much brighter light. I love a well lit work area!

The $5 Walmart rug shown in the photo above ended up getting a pull in it and I decided to upgrade it. I searched all over the place. I even purchased one from Home Goods and another one from Garden Ridge and returned both of those. They just did not look right. And were too expensive for something I didn't love. Finally one day I was grocery shopping at Walmart and decided just to glance at their rug selection. That's when I found this one. It was perfect. Dave & I both love how it matches the tile flooring/grout so well. And it was less than $20.

We try extremely hard not to let things collect on top of the freezer, washer/dryer these days. But, as you can see in the photos below, that doesn't always happen. (Just keepin' it real...) We do have spots for all that stuff in the laundry room closet (which will be shared at a later date in the 31 Days series). We could put hooks on the wall to the right as you enter the laundry room from the kitchen too...but we found from previous experience that our laundry room is just too narrow. You end up knocking coats/purses down that are hanging out in the way. And I can just see my little man Levi swinging from the diaper bag!

My clutter busting tip for this is to assign everything a place and be religious about putting it in its place at all times. And yeah, do as I say, not as I do...

Another thing we do to reduce clutter in the laundry room is to keep everything tucked away in the cabinets or the closet. I am all about keeping things hidden.

The cabinet on the left, above the washer, houses laundry detergent, stain treaters, dryer sheets and household cleaning supplies. I repurposed Schwan's ice cream buckets for stain treating and to store cloth diaper soap. And I repurposed a tupperware with no lid to act as a cleaning caddy for tall cleaning bottles.

The cabinet on the right houses all garage-related stuff (since we don't have a garage). We do have to work very hard to contain this to one cabinet, but it works.

On the top shelf, I repurposed a diaper box for car cleaners. The antifreeze and grease sit to the left of that. On the bottom shelf, we have rubber gloves, a bucket that contains the car cleaning sponge and rags and I repurposed a container that had no lid for brushes and other cleaning tools.

We also have a mini-barn out in the backyard where we keep other garage-related things like the mower, shovels, rakes, outdoor brooms, weed eater, gardening tools, etc. I'll show you more about that later, as well.

In general, I've found we just can't have a ton of stuff. Purge, purge, purge!!! That's the key. Like I said before, we had to come to terms with the fact that we live in a 1300 sq. ft. home with no garage or basement and somewhat small closets. You really just have to live more simply than the average American household. But there's NOTHING wrong with that. It's actually pretty refreshing...and money-saving.

I'm linking this up to The Mustard Ceiling today on the Roomspiration Blog Hop. Be sure to check out Elizabeth's gorgeous stenciled laundry room. It is amazing! Have a great day!