How to Maximize Laundry Room Organization
Make chores pleasant!
Laundry rooms are utilitarian spaces that are all about function… Or so we've been led to believe!
One of the trends you'll notice in recent home designs and new house construction is that people are putting much more thought into their laundry and utility rooms and are dedicating much more square footage to this very important chore: laundry.
Whether you're building a new home and have an opportunity to start a laundry room from scratch, or you have an existing laundry room that you wish had a little more functionality, here are a few simple tips that you can use to create more storage in your laundry room.
Step 1: Assess Your Space
First assess your laundry room and what is currently being stored in the laundry room to get the lay of the land. If your laundry room is currently the go-to place for storage of bulk materials and products like paper towels, toilet paper, and cleaning supplies like detergent and bleach, there might be another place (besides the laundry room) in your home to store these things.
Is there additional space in your garage where you can add units to store these elements? Maybe you have a garage with shelves, organizational hangers, etc. If there is no other area in your home where you can store these large bulky items, then you will need to make sure you understand how much of these bulk elements you need to store consistently before you can figure out the right storage solution for laundry and other bulky products like detergent and bleach
The other thing you need to consider while assessing your space for laundry is the activities that happen in your laundry room. Is your laundry room simply the place to do laundry, clean, and dry your clothing, or is it also the place where clean clothes are folded and stored on hangers and shelving until they move to their permanent places? Do you do any ironing in your space for laundry? You might need to fit an ironing board and other ironing accessories. If this is the case, you might want to think about how to add in some flat surfaces to allow for this very important activity.
The most important question you’ll want to ask yourself as you assess your space is this: Is the current washing machine and dryer combo what you want to build your laundry space around?
If you know that in the next six months to a year you'll be buying a new washer and dryer unit to do laundry, you might not want to add a storage element that will no longer work in your space for laundry once the new washer and dryer combo is installed. If it's likely that you will be buying a new unit or set of units for laundry soon, then do some cursory research on the type of unit you want for the kind of laundry you have, the features that are important to you and your laundry, and the typical size of those units so that you can plan and work around these units for your long-term laundry and laundry room storage solutions.
You’ll likely want to store bulk items behind cabinet doors. You can easily organize and store things like laundry detergent, fabric softener, etc. on open shelving. Shelves allow you to grab things quickly but can cause your space to look cluttered so keep that in mind. Creating a space to fold and organize clothes can be a little tricky, but you might be able to add a countertop, butcher block, or extra piece of wood on top of a front-loading washer and dryer for makeshift shelving and tabletop.
And finally, let's not forget that if this is the utility room, it is also your cleaning supply room, so you’ll need to know where you're going to store brooms, mops, and other apparatus. You don't want to add an upper cabinet behind the swing door, therefore causing a collision every time you try to enter the room.
Now that you've done your inventory and you’ve created a high-level plan for your storage needs, it's time to go shopping for just the right elements.
When looking for cabinetry to add to your space, make sure that whatever cabinets you add have a similar door profile to the built-ins you already have in your laundry room. You don't want the new cabinets to look completely different from what you already have going on in the room.
If you find it difficult to find cabinet door profiles that match your built-ins and the things that you need to store lend themselves to open storage, then our recommendation would be to simply add open shelves rather than upper cabinets to your space.
Open shelves are a completely different style of storage that allow you the flexibility to go in a different direction than your current built-in cabinets.
Identify the elements you want to bring into the space, make sure that you measure your room twice, and then order your materials and plan a weekend warrior project!
Award-winning, Baton Rouge-based interior designer and content creator Arianne Bellizaire has been named a High Point Market Authority Style Spotter (2015), Perlick Ambassador of Cool (2017), Villeroy & Boch Color Challenge Winner (2017), Modenus Blog Tour invitee (2016 & 2019), and Modenus DesignHound (Spain and London 2016, Surfaces 2018). She was also selected as an Ambassador for NYDC 2020 What's New What's Next. Her work and expertise have been featured in Forbes, Rue Daily, House Beautiful, Good Housekeeping, Business Of Home, and USA Today.
