Laundry Room Makeover

 

One of the challenges of a having a large family is the endless piles of laundry. Laundry that needs to be washed, laundry that needs to be folded, and laundry that needs to be put away. You never know what you're going to find in the dirty laundry. I find clean and folded clothes at the bottom of the hamper pretty often. Some times I even find new clothes with the tags still on them. The laundry basket is the perfect place to stash stuff when you're 5 years old and too lazy to put it away. The more children you have, the more laundry you have.

 

Anyway, clean clothes are one of the basics needs for every family no matter what size your family is and no matter what Mom has going on in her life, she still has to supply food and clothing for the gang, day in and day out. It can be frustrating and exhausting to wash and fold your days away if your laundry area is not functional.

 

I recently spent a few months in what we call "survival mode". We were about to have baby number 4 and it was all I could do to feed and dress everyone daily. My goal was to simply survive and keep everyone alive each day. Sounds easy enough right? Well, it wasn't! 

 

I'm not even going to go into the feeding everyone part, that's another story. But my laundry area was in a tiny closet in the hallway, next to the kitchen. It was dark, ugly, and not at all functional. I hated standing there folding clothes. So naturally I carried the clothes to my bed to fold them there. But once I was in there I thought I'd better go ahead and get the next load started. And then after that load was started something better always seemed to come up. Before I  knew it, it was bedtime and there was my bed with a massive pile of clean clothes covering it. Obviously, it wasn't working for me.

 

Thanks to Pinterest, I came up with this crazy idea to move the laundry area to a hallway by the back door. It might be the best idea I've ever had and it's certainly made doing the laundry more enjoyable and functional.

 

 

Beginning stages of our new mud room.

 

 

 

View from the den.

 

 



Backdoor entrance.

 

 

I already owned the big shelf so all we had to do was round up some baskets to sort folded clothes and store all of our clutter. The top shelf is where we store the picnic basket, outdoor tablecloths, and outdoor blankets. The second shelf is detergent, softener, bleach, and guinea pig food. The third shelf is mom and dad's basket and the missing sock basket (which is always full). The fourth shelf is the girls baskets and the bottom is flip flops & pool towels.

 

I hope this idea can inspire someone else to spruce up their laundry area and make the dreaded task a tiny bit more enjoyable.