How to Organize Your Laundry Space with a Rolling Cart

Today I’m sharing how I created a functional and organized laundry alcove by setting up a cart dedicated to laundry supplies.

Welcome to Week 3 of the 10 Week Organizing Challenge! This week we are tackling our laundry room and mudroom.   

If you live in a new home with a huge laundry room and tons of built in storage then it probably feels pretty easy to keep your laundry space organized and functional.  But if you do your laundry in a closet, or an alcove off your hallway, or in a tiny entry/mudroom (like in our last house), it can be challenging to keep your laundry room organized and clutter free.  Today I’m sharing how I created a functional laundry zone in our basement hallway by using a rolling cart for cute and easy storage, as well as my four steps for creating organization in your laundry space.

We always begin our organizational projects with a good…

Purge

Pull everything out! I know it’s a big job, but it’s the only way to do it probably.  Get rid rid of all products that are old, expired, unused, empty, or belong in a different area of the house.

Group What You Have by Type

For example, you may have:

• household cleaning supplies (glass cleaner, anti-bac spray, special cleaning cloths, and gloves)
• stain treatments (for laundry but also including goo gone, magic erasers, and sticky rollers)
• shoe products (cleaner, polish, spray etc.)
• carpet and upholstery cleaners (including carpet or upholstery spot treatments)
• laundry detergents/bleach/oxy/dryer sheets and clothes pins
• general Cleaning: extra dishwasher tabs, baking soda, lysol wipes, light bulbs, Borax, Extra dryer sheets, paper towel, large garbage bags etc.

Decide What Goes Where

Think about the different laundry related and other cleaning supplies and materials you may have and what areas of your home you want to store things in.  For example, in our previous house we stored all of our cleaning supplies in our laundry room shelves and cupboards.  In this house, it makes more sense for us to store most of our cleaning supplies under the kitchen sink and/or in the bathrooms where we use them, and just the laundry supplies and a few overflow items in the basement laundry alcove. You will want to organize according to  how your house is laid out and where you have the most storage space.

Consider You Storage Options

What do you already have in place for storage solutions? Are they working? What things do you need to store but don’t have room for? Or what storage pieces do you have that are not functional? It’s time to reassess and look at what exactly you need to store before investing in new storage pieces.

Those grouped items? Figure out how you want to store them. Be creative.  You might want to consider investing in some shelving or storage solutions if your small laundry room doesn’t have any. Even simple open shelving can work wonders when used with lovely storage containers – check out my laundry room organizing post from the first time I tackled this challenge and my roundup full of ideas: beautifully organized SMALL laundry rooms here for some more great ideas!

How I Organized Our Tiny Laundry Alcove

Our current laundry space is not so much of a room but just a small alcove off the hallway in the basement.  I shared the other part of our basement yesterday, when I shared all about how we setup a mudroom in a tiny space off the back door.  The laundry alcove is to the left, after you go down the stairs. Here is how it was looking BEFORE…

You can just see the white washer and dryer poking out on the right side of the picture above.  The entire hallway ended up getting a complete makeover (which I’ll share tomorrow).  Here is how it looked from the opposite angle…

We don’t currently have a countertop on top of our washer/dryer (something I’d love to add in the future), so I had instead used our old console table to hold supplies, and had tucked a couple of laundry bins on the lower shelf.  This picture is looking back towards the landing at the bottom of our stairs…

The console table wasn’t very functional because it encroached on the hallway, making it slightly awkward to get around in that space.  I decided to replace it with a turquoise rolling cart that is perfect for holding the majority of our laundry supplies (and also makes a cute little feature in the space)…

You can see that a small rolling cart is a great option to corral of your laundry supplies! I’ve got dryer sheets, OXY, and another powder laundry cleaner on the top in glass containers.  If you use pods, they could easily be stored there as well (we are currently using liquid detergent).  On the middle shelf I store our soap for delicates as well as all of our stain solutions.  And the bottom is dedicated to rags, floor cloths, and rollers.  I’ve gathered some rolling carts for you if you are in the market for one…

I also hung our handy drying rack on this door (which is a second door leading into the family/rec room in case you’re wondering).

On the long wall that used to hold the console table, I hung the big “Wash and Dry” sign that I purchased before moving into this house and haven’t even hung up yet! I also hung a small drying rack (the same one that was in our previous laundry room – you can see that post here, or check out the wall mounted drying rack on Amazon).

Wall mounted drying rack:

I placed the heavy, liquid laundry soap and bleach in a basket on top of the washer, as it helps hide the ugly pipes sticking up at the back.

We use the two small wall cabinets, which are slightly hard to access, to hold overflow items we don’t use very often including shoe polish, carpet and upholstery cleaner/stain removed, and extra light bulbs.

I would still love to update this laundry area a bit more; perhaps continue the wallpaper from the feature wall in the hallway and add a countertop over the unit, but at least this little hallway-laundry-room is much more organized, functional, light, bright, and enjoyable to do laundry in now!

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I also shared my laundry room organization tips the first time I tackled the 10 Week Organizing Challenge in our previous house…

How to Completely Organize Your Laundry Space in Three Steps

20+ Beautiful & Organized Small Laundry Rooms  

In week 3 of the last round, I also shared how we organized our mudroom/entry…

How to Create an Organized Entry or Mud Room in a Small Space

Small Entry & Mud Room Organization Ideas

 

Check out my other posts in the 10 Week Organizing Challenge Series 2.0!

Ready to get your home organized?  It’s free and easy to follow along!

You can sign-up for my email list and will be sent an update with instructions each week for the next ten weeks about tackling the 10 Week Organizing Challenge in your own home.

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By reader request, I’ve also made this 10 Week Organizing Challenge into an e-book! 

Follow along with the Ten Week Organizing Challenge through this e-book using your tablet.  It includes bonus free printable checklists for each week of the challenge…

Learn all about the Ten Week Organizing Challenge E-book here.