Designing Domesticity: Laundry Room Refresh Reveal

When we first moved into our Charlotte house close to a year and a half ago there was one room that just didn't make sense, functionally. The laundry room. It's a strange shape, kind of L-esque, with loads of underutilized space and a weird layout that doesn't allow for much flexibility. The previous owner had a side-by-side washer and dryer, but we choose a stacked version to allow for a small secondary refrigerator to be added to the space.

There were always piles of laundry on the floor and stacked on the table, due to only having one laundry basket that we would haul upstairs a couple of times a week, as well as an oversized drying rack that limited the access to the sink, cabinets and fridge. In a nutshell, it worked but not well.

Usually I would just shut the door and repeat my old mantra: "Someday we'll sort this space out. It's just a laundry room after all."

But, recently, something changed. I decided I didn't want to spend so much time in a space that really made my skin crawl, from both a functionality and aesthetic perspective. What's the point of suffering if you don't have to? I was confident that I could improve the laundry room with a little research and not much money.

Here's how it came together...

Solving the functionality issues first, I added a sorting laundry hamper to keep the clothes off the floor while they wait to be cleaned and a wall mounted drying rack to eliminate the need for the oversized rack that took up way too much space in this tiny, ill shaped room. So simple I found myself wondering, as usual, why I hadn't thought of these solutions before.

I could have easily stopped there, but what's the harm in making it pretty, too :)

You know where this is going already, don't you? A quick trip to my fave discount stores and I came home with an inexpensive print and rug to freshen up this ho-hum space.

While I was prettifying the space, I reorganized the cabinets as well by adding some symmetry to shelves, a couple of baskets to hide the uglies and generally spifying up the place. By the way, we keep our wine in here too - is that weird? Haven't quite figured out the whole wine cellar thing just yet!