Something I really wanted when we moved recently was to find a house with a laundry room on the second floor that had plenty of space for processing laundry. I had transitioned the laundry room from the mudroom to the second floor master bathroom of our last home and loved that our clothing never left the second floor. It meant no more toting dirty clothes down the stairs and clean clothes up. In my mind it was a darn near perfect system!
When it came time to move, the house we found was perfect, with the exception of the laundry room. This laundry room was not only on the first floor, but it was tiny, poorly laid out and would also have to function as a mudroom. The room’s only redeeming quality was a large closet two feet deep and almost eight feet long. The layout was so bad that if you wanted to open the bi-fold doors to the closet to access its contents you had to close the door to the room. As my husband was not amenable to my spending the money to relocate the laundry room to the second floor, I had to punt.
My solution involved first removing the cumbersome bi-fold doors and placing them in the basement. (We later repurposed them in the remodel of our basement.) This one step went a long way towards opening up the space. Here is a photo of the left side of the empty closet.
My next step was creating a list of everything that would have to go in to this closet / all of the functions this closet would have to serve. Here is what I came up with:
1) Shoe storage for family
2) Hanging space for clothes that dry on hangars
3) Storage for hangars, laundry basket & dryer rack
4) Storage for lightbulbs, basic tools, etc
5) Storage for cleaning implements including vacuum, broom, mop, etc
6) Storage for all things dog related, including her bed and food.
I used Elfa shelving from the Container Store to create this space and it has served us well for almost five years now.
We have plenty of space for shoes and I have enough room for clothes that hang dry. The baskets on the second shelf store dog supplies, flip flops and extra plastic bags.
The laundry basket sits atop an Elfa 4 drawer system that holds misc tools, cleaning supplies and cleaning rags. The top shelf holds containers of various types of lightbulbs.
The wall on the left side of the closet holds basic tools, like a level and a hammer, while the wall on the right side of the closet holds brooms, mops and dusting wands.
On the floor to the left are tool boxes and the dog bed, while the on the floor to the right are containers of dog food and the vacuum.
Thanks to Elfa and a good design we have a place for everything even though we initially didn’t think we had the space.