Laundry Room Organization

How to organize your laundry room and mudroom so that everything you need has a home within your home. 

Welcome to Week Three of the Ten Week Organizing Challenge!  You can read all the details about this challenge in my introductory post here.  So far in this organization challenge we have dealt with paper clutter and setup a family command center, as well as completely purged and organized the kitchen.

Laundry Room Organizational Challenge

I love starting this challenge off with the most commonly used spaces in our family, so next up on the list is the laundry room / mudroom. This is a shared space, directly off our garage, as well as directly on the path into our kitchen. It’s ideally located, so this room has recently also become our family office/command center as well. Today I’m sharing how I got the laundry room half of this space purged and organized, and tomorrow I’ll be back to share the family entry/mudroom side of this room!

Tips for Laundry Room Organization 

If your family is anything like ours, you do a LOT of laundry. And you probably deal with a LOT of in-and-out stuff (shoes, coats, bags, etc.). You know, all the stuff that we use on a pretty much daily basis.

So where does it go? How can we store it all? AND keep it tidy and functional?!

Well, it’s always easier to keep your home functional and tidy when you have a system (or systems) in place. So in addition to going through and purging the laundry and mudroom this week, we are also making sure that EVERYTHING in your home has it’s own home.

A home in your home, that’s kinda catchy, right?

I will confess that we are very lucky in this house to have a good sized space dedicated to both laundry and the day-to-day mudroom related stuff. A decent sized laundry room/mudroom was actually one of the key things on my list when we were looking for the right house plan to build. BUT… I’ve also undertaken this organizing challenge in much smaller spaces.

If you are working with smaller spaces (or no space at all, really) then you might find this article, that I wrote while living in our Forest House, to be helpful. We had a laundry ‘alcove’ instead of a laundry ‘room’, so space and function were at a premium.

How to organize your laundry space with a rolling cart (updated challenge in 2020)

In this house, we have more space, and a fabulous amount of storage, so this week’s challenge was much faster and easier than it has been in past homes.

As I’ve mentioned, things just all kind of got slap-dash-style put away when we moved in and there was little rhyme or reason to their placement. The laundry room cabinets were looking either overstuffed with no order or system to them at all.

OR, randomly underused cupboards and kind of empty…

Ugh.

Step ONE:

Take everything out!

I took everything out. I mean, everything! I put it all on the floor in the laundry room.

Step TWO: Purge!

I went through and purged several items that we never use or that were out of date etc.

Step THREE: Sort!

I then placed everything into categories as best I could, by moving them around the room into ‘sections’.

Step FOUR: Assess Storage

I measured the cabinets in the laundry room and took my list of measurements as well as my measuring tape to the store and picked up some new baskets to fit in the tall laundry pantry cabinet. I figured out which combination available baskets would work, and purchased and brought them home.

Step FIVE: Organize According to Category!

These are the ‘jute’ look baskets that I used:

I then compared my basket sizes to what I had, and placed items of the same category into each basket…

The baskets house everything beautifully, by category, so it’s easy for me to find what I’m looking for just by pulling out the correct basket. I considered labeling them, but haven’t needed to at this point because it’s quite easy to still see what is in them.

Setting things up this way meant that the top two cupboards above the laundry sink are now completely empty! I plan to use them for any overflow pantry items when we go to Costco. I also moved the mop bucket under the sink, where it sits beside my ‘to-be-bleached’ bucket.

The drawers in the laundry room cabinetry were also not being used well at all, and I dealt with them when I dealt with our paperwork/command center during week one. They are now mainly dedicated to our family office supplies, with the top drawer being an organized junk drawer and the middle drawer housing all of our chords/tech equipment. We use the bottom drawer for old towels and rags etc.

Before…

The top drawer was full of super random stuff:

After….

It’s our home office super organized ‘junk’ drawer:

I used baskets similar to these:

 

Before…

The middle drawer was full of linens, which I relocated to the dining room (that makes sense, eh?)!:

After…

All of our family technology related supplies:

I can’t tell you how great it feels to have our laundry area functional! I haven’t shared a lot about this space yet, but it’s one of my favourite spots in the house just because of how much function it adds to our home compared to our laundry/mudroom spaces in the past.

The beautiful cabinets in here are custom, made by the same company (Namor Cabinets and Millwork) that did our kitchen. You can read about that here.  They are painted in Benjamin Moore’s Knoxville Gray, the same colour that we had the kitchen island painted. The tiles are inexpensive marble herringbone from Home Depot.

I would like to note that we have a cupboard just around the corner from this room where we keep our vacuum and mop etc. It actually wasn’t in the original plans, but I asked our contractor to frame a small door that would access the space under the stairs and we had it wired with a plug. We call it our Harry Potter cupboard.

We also have our family command center/ office set-up in this area – and you can see a little section of our command center to the right of the bench. You can read more about that in this post. 

 

So far in this year’s updated version of the challenge, I’ve shared:

 

Want this in an easy to digest e-book form? You can learn more about that here!

You can see all of the posts related to my original take on this Ten Week Organizing Challenge by visiting my challenge Intro article here.  

AND…the first time I tackled this challenge back in 2017, I shared these posts for Week Three (Laundry Room and Mud Room):

Week Three: Laundry and Mud Room

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

How to Completely Organize Your Laundry Space in Three Steps

How to setup a functional mudroom in small space (updated challenge in 2020)

How to organize your laundry space with a rolling cart (updated challenge in 2020)

Inspiration Articles:

 20+ Beautiful & Organized Small Laundry Rooms  

Small Entry & Mud Room Organization Ideas.

Each week over the course of this challenge, I’m going to be sharing my process of working through this challenge in our new home with updated tricks, tips, and organizing systems. If you want to follow along with my new version of the challenge, sign-up below for my new email list! Ten Week Organizing Challenge 2022.