Laundry Room + Tips & Tricks

1:43 PM

When Hershey and I moved in together 7 years ago, there was a natural delegation of housework that took place. Hershey takes out the trash and cleans up the kitchen after I ~~tornado~~ cook, I cook and do the laundry. And when we added 2 little bundles of joy to our family, my laundry duty DOUBLED. I curse the day I took over laundry duty.

When we started searching for a home, it was important to me that I had a home for my beautiful stainless steel Samsung washer and dryer. Lucky for me, the split-level house that we fell in love with had a finished little laundry nook on the mudroom level. It’s even got a window with a beautiful view of the Ramapo mountains!

The only problem with it was that it was diarrhea brown (just like the mudroom, and most of the rest of the house), with red trim. Barf. It was dark and dank and depressing.

Over Christmas break, we decided to take a couple of days to give my little jail cell a much-needed face lift. I had a lot of inspiration, especially since I have been cutting out pictures of laundry rooms in BH&G since before a house was a twinkle in my eye. I’m telling you that one day that TV on my Pinterest inspiration board WILL be in my laundry room!

Here’s how it’s coming along:

Looking into the laundry room

My “gallery wall”

Looking into the closet nook

Hanger Nook

Looking out into the mudroom

The color that I chose to paint the room was Old Pickup Blue by Benjamin Moore. Since the room is at ground level, I wanted a cheerful color that reminded me of the sky. When we first started rolling the color onto the walls, we were terrified that it was going to be TOO blue. But once we finished the trim and the door, it is the perfect shade of blue.

I tried to think of functionality when choosing the accessories for the room. I printed all of the laundry labels in the floating frame off of the Better Homes & Gardens website, and the inspiration for the wall came from DIY Playbook. In that link, there is another link to many of the FREE printables that I went with for our laundry room. The only disappointment was that the yellow of the one print did not come out as YELLOW as it is in the images, but I went with it anyway. I purchased all of the frames at Target.

We still have a few finishing touches to add. Since the girls were sick most of winter break, and have been sick most of every month ever since, with Hershey’s time being spent coaching basketball, the laundry room fell by the wayside. But we do already HAVE a white, double-door cabinet to hang, a wire basket with hooks that I spray painted white for the “stuff” that I find at the bottom of the dryer, and I even ALMOST finished this AMAZING drying rack to hang on the wall. I just have to slap on one more coat of paint and install the hardware.

I’ve also been eyeballing this hanger holder so that I can hang up Hershey’s work shirts as I fold. The finishing touch will be a counter that Hershey is going to install above the washer and dryer so that I have a folding area. What do you guys think? Should we do wood, marble, or concrete? I’m so indecisive about this part, for some reason!

And if you’re wondering about that cute little hanger nook, I simply threw a small tension rod that I had laying around up there. It doesn’t really NEED to be anything heavy duty since I’m only using it to store hangers, but it really does a layer of functionality to an area that I had NO IDEA what to do with!

There are a couple of things that I do to make dealing with the dirty laundry just a bit more tolerable. First, you may have noticed the GIANT jug of vinegar in the closet nook. I’ve been working on using Ruth’s top 10 thrifty cleaning products, and this one seemed like a no-brainer. Fabric softener sheets cost anywhere from $6-$8 for a box. I spent $1.88 on 128 oz. of vinegar. I thought that using vinegar as fabric softener was going to make everything smell bad and not work at all, but, quite the opposite! The inside of my washing machine is sparkling, my clothes are soft, and you can’t even smell the vinegar. SCORE!

Additionally, I am a HUGE fan of Method Concentrated Laundry Detergent. You can get 75 washes from 30 oz. and the sleek packaging cuts down on our carbon footprint. What’s better than that?

Another quick tip that I can offer is to do the laundry daily. I know that this sounds time intensive and insane, but, I throw in a load every day and even though I may not get to fold it and put it away right away, it makes doing laundry so much less daunting on the weekends.

What do you do to make laundry duty suck a little less? Any quick tips or tricks that we can’t live without?

Whatever you do, make sure to give yourself a space that you enjoy being in for this chore, because it takes a long time, and a lot of energy, so you may as well be happy while you’re doing it!

Have a lovely <laundry-free> weekend everyone!

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