Before & After: Modern Laundry Room Reveal

In every place I’ve lived, there’s always that one room that accumulates all the extra.  The leftovers, the put-aways, the donations, the I-don’t-quite-know-what-to-do-with-this-right-now-so-I’m-going-to-leave-it-here-and-forget-all-about-its…you catch my drift.  In this house, it has become the laundry room (though sometimes it gets a little competition from our office).

Last week I wrote a post about the best ways to organize your laundry room.  At that point, ours was a catch-all for everything we didn’t want or couldn’t fit in any of the main rooms, as well as a temporary “Craigslist” room where we kept items we planned on selling.

This, of course, was not exactly conducive to the actual function of the room.  I was tired of finding my way through the maze of junk just to wash my son’s pajamas, and sick of dumping out our clean laundry onto the sofa in the family room to fold.  Enough was enough!  Time to get my hands dirty.

My requirements were:

• A surface where we could sort and fold laundry comfortably
• A place to hang our ironing
• A better system for our ironing board, which hung on the back of the door and prevented anyone from entering the room while it was in use

If you are planning out an organizational space such as a closet, laundry room, or garage, I highly recommend making several sketches first.  It helps you visualize your concept and can illuminate any flaws in your plan.  I revised my sketch several times until it looked like this:

But even still, you will see from the After photos that my plans changed.  I decided to use the laundry baskets that we already owned, and simply hung them under the floating shelf.  Plus, the wall banner that I made last weekend didn’t quite “go” as well as I’d hoped, so I hung it in our family room instead and moved in a photograph from our bedroom.

Before:

After:

[Plywood is actually not a great thing to put in your home because it off-gasses.  I broke my own rules here, but it’s a small piece and we keep the door to this room closed.  Don’t worry, you can totally build this shelf without plywood.]

The walls are painted with some oops! paint from the Home Depot, which cost all of $7, and I found the Ikea bar stool on Craigslist for $30. The clothing rod is actually a towel rack from Ikea that cost about $10. I built the peg rack using some extra lumber and Ikea pegs, and color-blocked my broom and duster with some white spray paint.

However, I’m most proud of the floating shelf which I built with some plywood, lumber, screws, and a few L-brackets.  It cost me $40, but only because I picked a more expensive piece of plywood.

I kept the baskets the same and borrowed the rug and artwork from the rest of my house, so all in all the whole project came to just under $100.  Not bad!

Before:

After:

Now, you may notice there is no washer or dryer in these photos.  Believe me–we have them, but they are on the other side of the room.  However, our hot water heater and air conditioning are also in this room next to the washer and dryer, and there is no drywall on that side.  It’s nothing you need (or want) to see, believe me.

I still have to mount my drying racks, which will hang in between the ironing board (which is not pictured, but is now on the far left wall) and the cleaning equipment. I would also LOVE any ideas for covering up/fixing our fusebox.  Right now we have a piece of drywall on hinges, but as you can see from this photo there is a big, ugly gap.

Of course at the moment I’m not loving how close to the ceiling the clothing rod is either, but it does allow extra room for dresses.

What do you think?  Would you have done anything differently?

Product guide: GLENN Bar Stool from Ikea //  Planters from Goodwill // Lumber from The Home Depot // MOLGER Wall Shelf from Ikea // Broom, duster, and rug from Home Goods

To see the rest of our house, visit our Before & After page. Check back soon to find out how you can build a floating shelf just like this one!