Clutter Crushing ~ The Laundry Room

With eight children, you can imagine that laundry is a big deal around our house. I have been planning a Clutter Crushing makeover for a while now and am so excited to call this room complete.

Let's start with a BEFORE picture...

     As with the other rooms in the house, the laundry room had obviously gotten out of hand.  Now to be fair, part of the reason for the multitude of bags on the floor was that our dryer was not working properly and our laundry pile had been backing up.  But other than that, there were several issues of organization and function that needed to be worked through.

1.  I desperately needed a system of washing, drying, and folding that could easily be maintained even by my oldest children who trade out the chore of helping with the laundry.

2. I needed organization to rid the clutter!  The laundry room had become a catch-all for many items that didn't have a place, but certainly didn't belong in the laundry room.

3.  I wanted the space to be pretty and inviting.  After all, maybe that would motivate me to want to be in there more often.... I said **maybe**!

    Thanks to some awesome friends, we got our dryer up and working again and got caught up with our laundry.  In the meantime, I painted and Chad hung up extra shelving. A few fun bins and we had accomplished our task!

     These are the pics I took as soon as we loaded the bins onto the shelf, but before the laundry room was back in full-swing mode of operation.  You can see that the extra shelving has added a ton of storage space.  Previously, that was all just wasted space.

     I love the fun blue and green, but am even more excited about the function of the new laundry system thanks to all of those wonderful bins.  Each of the five larger bins are used as soon as the laundry is dry.  I can pull an item out of the dryer and immediately fold it and place it in the correct bin.  There is one for each bedroom in the house (master, boys' room, girls' room, nursery) and one to be taken to the linen closet. 

     Each bin has a small mesh bag for undies and other small items that are hard to fold.  Once a day the kids are responsible for getting their bins from the laundry room, taking them to their rooms and putting their clothes away, then bringing the empty bins back.  So far this system is working beautifully!

     Previously, we only had one dirty clothes hamper and that was clearly not enough!  Also, I wanted a system of dividing the clothes into lights, darks, and towels to make it easier for my laundry helpers to throw the appropriate clothing in the wash.  So we purchased three new hampers.  (You can see the third in picture above.)

Finally, we are using these bins as our "sock baskets".  I'm not sure that all families can fully understand the craziness of matching socks for 10 people.  I try to simplify this task by only purchasing white socks for the kids.  The goal is for each child to leave the house wearing a pair of socks that sort of match and sort of fit.  I don't have the time or the brain power to figure out which socks belong to each child.  Instead, I now have two sock baskets that hold our "matched socks" and one that holds "unmatched socks".  If they need a pair, they just grab them from the laundry room.

Once the organization and function was complete, I wanted to turn my focus toward a little decorating.  I searched Pinterest and Etsy for inspiration.  I found several fun canvas photos that I liked, but didn't have the funds to spend $20-40 a piece for them.  So, I just made my own.

 

     I was pleasantly surprised at the easiness of this project!  I found some free clipart online (the laundry pins and the baskets) and used my digital scrapbooking program to create these four 8x10 prints.  I sent them to a one-hour printing shop since our printer is out of ink which cost me a little less than $10.  I had four unused 11x14 canvases that I had purchased several months ago (2 for $6) and painted them brown.  I glued the prints to the center and applied a coat of mod-podge over each canvas.

     SO thrilled with the results!  These prints were exactly what I wanted and I got them for a fraction of the cost by making them myself!

     We've been using our new laundry room for a little over a week now and it's still staying clean, organized, and functional!

Check out my other Clutter Crushing makeovers:
The Medicine Cabinet
Under the Bathroom Sink
The Pantry
The Linen Closet
The Shoe Closet 

*Update*

Several people have been asking if I could share the images I created for my laundry room decor. I am posting them below. Feel free to right click and save the images to your computer. Please use them for personal use only. You may not sell my images. I hope this is helpful to you.

 
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