Clutter is a thief that robs you of your precious space and time. Minutes lost each day to finding things or performing simple tasks like doing the laundry can add up over the course of a week. Not to mention causing a lot of needless frustrations.
In most homes, the laundry room is one of those places that are prone to the gradual buildup of clutter. Days and weeks go by with small items building up in the laundry room. An extra box of dryer sheets here, two different types of detergent for specialty garments there, and unsorted laundry everywhere. It’s all fun and games until one day someone doesn’t collapse the stubborn ironing board away, and you are forced to accept that you have a laundry room clutter problem.
If this sounds like the sort of thing you’re up against, then you might want to consider tackling and taming the tidal wave of clutter in your laundry room with one or more of the following tips.
Understand Your Space & Your Needs
In a lot of homes, the laundry room is down in the basement or in some back utility room that is out of the way of the main part of the home. Though some modern homes put the laundry facilities as an extension of the kitchen. Some apartments and condos will even install a stackable washer and dryer in the bedroom closet.
Wherever your laundry facilities are in your home, or what they’re adjacent to, you need to start the decluttering process by removing all things that are not laundry related. Canned goods can go into the kitchen pantry, and seasonal coats and old clothes can be placed into flat totes and slid under the bed.
Once you’ve got all the non-laundry-related items out, you will have a better understanding of your available space. Then you can start deciding what laundry items you need to keep in place.
Adjustable Shelves To Maximize Vertical Storage Space
Adjustable shelves are one of the easiest solutions for maximizing the vertical storage potential of any shelving system. They come in particularly handy in laundry rooms where different-shaped jugs compete with different sizes of aroma boosters and irons for precious square inches.
You can even install track systems or drilled dowel pegs to add adjustable shelves to your existing static shelves. This is a low-cost way to give everything a dedicated space in your laundry room.
Under-Shelf Baskets
If you have static shelves and installing adjustable shelves isn’t an option in your laundry room, the next best fallback solution is to install wire baskets under the shelves. They can often be integrated with simple drawer sliders to let you pull the baskets out with ease.
Under-shelf baskets are a great way to keep lightweight, loose items from adding to your laundry room clutter. You can use them to store things like dryer sheets, laundry aroma boosters, lint rollers, stain sticks, and more.
Shelf Dividers
Shelf dividers attack disorganization on the horizontal plane. You can use them to keep laundry items from getting tangled or invading each other’s space. If you happen to run out of something, the divider can then be temporarily removed to let you reorganize and optimize the rest of the space on the shelf for other essential laundry items.
Collapsible Hampers
Laundry hampers play an essential role in whites away from the bleeding effects of colored clothes. Yet they also take up a lot of space when they aren’t in use. One of the best ways to minimize them becoming magnets for clutter is to use collapsible hampers.
They can be left in the laundry room, or brought out to other parts of the house. Many people will even use them in place of laundry baskets for delivering clean laundry back to each person’s dresser.
A Hinged Ironing Board
Ironing boards are one of those necessary evils in a laundry room. Without one, all your important pressed clothes would go out into the world with wrinkles. Yet they take up a lot of space, and the engineering of that folding leg system is far from perfect.
The simple solution here is to install a hinged ironing board. It attaches to the wall and folds down easily without that strange mechanism messing with the feet. You can even install it into a very shallow cabinet that keeps it tucked discretely away.
Overhead Closet Poles and Retractable Shelves
A lot of laundry rooms in the basement or utility room of a home is blessed with an abundance of overhead space. This is a perfect way to get laundry room clutter and excess storage items up and out of your way.
Adding a retractable overhead shelf to the mix can give you a place to keep laundry items you bought in bulk, as well as storage boxes or small totes of off-season clothing items.
As an added bonus, you can easily add a small closet pole. When the shelf is retracted up toward the ceiling the pole is the perfect place to keep hung items after you’re done ironing them.
When you need to bring the shelf down again, a spring-loaded hinge system or a crank-down system makes it easy to lower it, without the risk of dropping anything. Most of these shelves have a weight capacity in excess of 100 pounds for convenient storage.
Declutter and Design the Laundry Room of Your Dreams
Making the most out of the available space in your laundry room sometimes takes an experienced eye with the vision to see storage potential in the simplest of places. Here at ClosetTec we have a passionate team of designers, engineers, and fabricators with decades of experience transforming cluttered laundry rooms into efficient laundry spaces.
We have our own dedicated showroom that will let you explore all your hardware, accent, and trim options. We empower you to design a new laundry room with the kind of décor that makes you want to do the laundry. Then our team of installers transforms that vision into a reality for you.
