Organizing Journey: Laundry room

I absolutely love OrgJunkie's blog and have decided to start my own organizing journey with the encouragement and motivation from her 31 day Organizational Challenge!  My laundry room (okay, who am I kidding...my ENTIRE HOUSE) is in some serious need of organization and style.  I decided to start there because it is the first room my family sees when we walk into our home from the garage.  As it stands right now, it is quite a depressing way to enter and exit our home.  After four years of living in this house, the walls are still the ugly, cheap builder's beige that greeted us on the first showing.  I've managed to put a color swatch on the wall, but that's it!  Sad, but true.  And it's especially depressing because I adore color and don't shy away from bold statements.  

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The clutter and piles are getting out of control and this challenge is just what I needed to give myself a little push to get started!   Ugh...these pictures make me look like a hoarder or something!  I really just need some better organization and to take out the things that we never use (soaking sink, anyone?!)

One would think these cabinets and sink would be handy, but for us it is just a dumping ground.  The upper cabinet usually looks WAY worse.  The overflowing papers from 2012 have all been filed away and sorted for tax time already.  Do I really need spray and sample paints in my laundry room?  I think not!  I really want to lose these cabinets all together and move the sink pipes to the outside (garage) so my husband can have a work sink for his beer brewing.  In its place will be a shoe rack, coat storage, and hopefully some storage bins for hats, sunglasses, keys, etc. so they won't end up dumped in the dining room/kitchen

This is the storage closet and over full coat rack in the room.  I'd like for it to become our cleaning closet and nothing more unless there is room leftover.   We thought that coat rack would be extremely helpful right there since it seemed like dead space behind the door leading to the kitchen/dining room.  Instead, it has become stuffed with coats and doesn't allow us to fully open the door!  Really frustrating when we have our hands full and need full access.

This is the shelf/hanging rack right above our washer and dryer.  What's up there, you ask?  Oh, just my wedding dress and a dress I wore to my rehearsal dinner almost 4 years ago!!  I'm terrified to get it down in case my wedding dress is ruined somehow.  Guess I'm going to have to face that fear soon with the 31 Day Challenge I'm taking on!  *terrified!*

See that pretty ray of sunshine on the wall?  I can't wait for that to be the all-over color! I'm thinking accents of grey and maybe aqua too. We'll see about that.

This is the view from the garage when you first walk in the door.  Shoes scattered everywhere, dirty clothes on the floor, blank ugly walls.  Are you as depressed as I am yet? For this wall, I'm hoping to create a huge command center for our family.  Think over sized calendar with spots for each member of our family to fill in with activities and appointments, a chore sheet space, and an area where we can sort incoming mail and to-do items.  I am VERY excited about this area of the room being finished!

This last picture isn't in my laundry room.  Look hard enough and you'll see that it's our dining table.  I took this picture to show you where the overflow is going since our laundry room/entry room is such a disaster!  Diaper bags, daycare bags, coats, clothes and usually stacks of mail and to-do items are on this table.  If not there, then just 3 short feet away on our breakfast bar!  Never mind that tub under the table.  It's usually not there.  It was my attempt to get some organization in the basement utility room and it hasn't made its way down there yet!  Story of my life right now..sigh.

 

I hope you enjoyed my first post.  I'm looking forward to more updates as I get going on this project!  Any constructive criticism and advice is very much appreciated! :)

 

 

-Love, Pitter Patter

 



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