Organizing your Laundry Room

Whether you're the person who does the laundry in your home or simply the person who hears about the aggravation of doing it, what is often the smallest room in the house causes the  most complaints. While organizing your laundry room won't make the weekly chore a bundle of fun, it will help minimize the aggravation and help make everyone's life a little easier. Here's some ideas on how you can organize your laundry room and improve everyone's laundry experience.

Start outside the laundry room

• Install laundry hampers in the bedrooms or at least in the bathroom. Get at least two hampers, one for whites and light colors and the other for dark colored clothes, so the laundry will be 'presorted' before you even start. Kids (and husbands) can be taught which clothes go in which hampers and for the kids, it's a good life lesson to learn at an early age.

Declutter the laundry room itself

• Laundry rooms often become dropping areas for kids coats, school bags and books along with other miscellaneous “stuff.” Get the kids to hang their coats where they belong and take their school stuff to their rooms so getting started on the laundry won;t mean moving all kinds clutter that has nothing to do with laundry.
• It's also a good idea to throw away any old partial bottles of laundry detergent, bleach or other laundry products that are doing nothing but taking up space and gathering dust, making tor room seem cluttered.
  

Freshen the room up

• After decluttering, give the room a good cleaning to freshen it up. It probably hasn't happened since you moved in so moving the washer and dryer out of the room is a great way to be sure you've cleaned the room thoroughly.
• Applying a fresh coat of light colored paint to the walls will brighten the room right up and adding a new light fixture to provide  lots of light will eliminate  the 'dungeon-like' feeling  laundry rooms often have.
  

Install shelving either on the walls or over the machines themselves.

• Open wire shelving works well and you can turn virtual “dead space” into valuable storage space, but the downside is you can still see all the bottles and boxes. A more attractive alternative is a storage closet with doors you can close so your laundry products are out of sight. Inexpensive cupboards you put together yourself are available at box stores or consider recycling a kitchen cupboards you can get inexpensively from a recycling store run by an organization such as “Habitat for Humanity”.

Space for folding and sorting

• A flat space for folding clothes when they come out of the dryer is a great addition to any laundry room, but since space is often a concern, consider installing a wide board along an open wall. If you put hinges on the back side, you can fold it up out of the way when it's not in use, then simply fold it down for folding or sorting.
  

Murray Anderson is a veteran freelancer whose work has been appeared in books, newspapers and newsletters as well as on numerous web sites in both the United States and Canada. He writes on a wide range of topics including home, consumer, and personal subjects as well as general business and Marketing specific topics.