The Joy of Small But Functional Spaces

When we were looking for a condo in Knoxville, there were a couple of primary considerations.  Whatever we bought had to have two bedrooms and two full baths onto the main floor, and it had to have a laundry room with a sink.  In the end it was the laundry room that was most problematic.  The house we ended up in was the only house on the market at the time we looked that met all the above criteria, and the only house we looked at with a sink in the laundry room.

It became evident after we moved in that the laundry room must also double as utility closet and storage.  So shelves were installed and many bottles and baskets and piles of rags and laundry and what-not accumulated on those shelves, to the point of becoming an unholy mess.  After George died I straightened up and reorganized a bit, but never really pulled it together.  It got to the point that I hated the laundry room, hated having to do laundry, hated getting anything out or putting anything away.

It was a pretty sorry state of affairs.

Then about six weeks ago Lisa posted about refreshing her laundry room and I was inspired. That very week I decided to clean up the laundry room.  I took everything off the shelves, eliminated things that were no longer used, and started to rethink how items were stored.  This is the view of my laundry room, in mid transition, from the door.  As you can see, it is small and there are no windows or spaces for pretty posters, but at this point it is beginning to work well.

I realized that I didn't really like bottles lined up on shelves, especially miscellaneous small bottles, and the plastic bins I was using were not only ugly but actually impractical.  Small bottles of cleaning supplies could be more effectively grouped in baskets, as could mop heads, cleaning clothes, and other miscellaneous items so I went to Cost Plus World Market and bought baskets. (Thank you Lisa.) The fabric boxes on the top shelf were already in place, and store items that are needed infrequently.

A fair amount of planning went into what is stored where, based on frequency of use and ease of access. Various attractive boxes found in the house were also used to corral small items, like batteries, and small white rags (in shoe boxes).

 After I had gotten everything organized on the shelves, I addressed the countertop. I originally asked that the counter top be installed so that I could fold laundry as I removed it from the dryer without having to carry it to another room in the house (another downside of my previous house).  But the height of the surface, perfect for me, was too tall for most of our caregivers, and they did the majority of the laundry in the house.  We also needed far more space for rags and dirty laundry than I need now, so the pull out mesh baskets had been installed at the bottom of the shelving unit.

I realized that I didn't need the amount of laundry space offered by those mesh baskets, and I missed my folding space. It took me a couple of weeks, to get back to that project, but I eventually took them down and bought a pretty basket to hold the dirty rags.  And now I have a laundry room that actually works.

And yes there is still a bottle of vodka in the laundry room.