I’ve always been envious of those giant, spacious, open laundry rooms that you see in magazines and on Pinterest. So much space to sort laundry, store cleaning items, and just generally stay organized – I never thought I could have a laundry room like that. Well, I technically still don’t. The laundry room in our current house is actually the biggest laundry room we’ve ever had since it’s more than just a closet with sliding doors hiding our washer and dryer, but it’s still not ‘big’ by magazine standards.
Our current laundry room is a tiny little room that measures just slightly over 6 feet by 6 feet, which isn’t really much space to work with. In the two years we’ve lived in this house I have reorganized our laundry room at least 5 times trying to find the most functional space possible. Thank goodness my husband is {mostly} patient with me. 🙂
Through all of my trial and error, I have FINALLY found the perfect setup for the laundry room that makes doing laundry slightly more bearable. 😉 Here are the five lessons I learned about maximizing space in a tiny laundry room.
1. Stack the washer & dryer.
I realize that not everyone has a front-load washer and dryer, but if you do, I can’t recommend enough that you stack them. In our old house I always wanted to stack our washer and dryer because I felt like we would gain so much space in our laundry room, but we never actually did it. So when we moved, I had our new washer and dryer put in stacked. Let me tell you – BEST. DECISION. EVER!
2. Go UP.
When you’re working with a tiny room and you can’t go extreme and blow out walls or anything crazy, you have no choice but to go ‘up.’ I have wanted a laundry basket tower for quite some time to keep our clothes organized and ready to wash for everyone in the family, but didn’t know if there was actually space to pull it off. Well, I took a chance and spent about $60 to buy supplies to build a laundry tower and am so happy I finally have it! It’s so nice to be able to keep everyone’s laundry separate and it utilizes otherwise wasted space.
3. Use ALL the wall space.
I feel like one of the biggest mistakes that so many people make in laundry rooms (myself included) is to treat it like the rest of the house in terms of decorating and not really maximize the space for storage. So instead of adding decor to the laundry room, I decided to add a fun wallpaper to the main wall that is seen when you walk in. I then stained some 1″x2″ boards to act as a support for the 2″ x 10″ boards that I stained to use as shelves. Let me tell you – these are the easiest shelves to make because there are no brackets to screw in. Simply nail up the supports then rest the shelves on them and voila! And because they’re the length of the entire wall, there’s so much extra space added to store all the things you need for laundry, cleaning, and more!
4. Store less used items higher up.
I have a small collection of cake plates that I do actually use on occasion, so I wanted to be sure to have a place for them that’s out of the way so they won’t get broken, but close enough I can get them when I need them. So the top shelf in the laundry room is the perfect spot!
5. Group like items together in baskets.
I keep all of our cleaning supplies in our laundry room so I always know where they’re at, but I hated having to grab a ton of different bottles when I needed to take them to another room or upstairs when I needed to clean. So I organized all of our cleaning supplies by category or room they’re used in so when I’m going to clean the kitchen or bathroom, I just take the whole basket with me!
Hopefully you’ve seen through my efforts that despite the size of your laundry room, there’s always an opportunity to better use the space to make your life just a little bit easier.
