Designer Emily Henderson's Tips For Organizing Your Cluttered Laundry Room
Whether you're blessed with a spacious laundry room or cursed with a cramped washer and dryer closet, it's essential to keep your laundry space well organized. If the area is cluttered, you may feel your stress level rising. Further, the disorder can make locating the things you need challenging. And, once the room is orderly, you may find that your dread during laundry day has diminished.
When interior designer Emily Henderson organized her laundry room, she said it completely revolutionized her everyday life. In her own words, "All in all, I truly think it's going to be a daily life changer. It's clean, so functional, so organized and it lends itself to making sure that we keep our lives in order," per Style By Emily Henderson. If you want your chore life completely transformed, you'd be wise to follow Henderson's advice on organizing your laundry room. You'll find two of her most important tips below.
Decant and use baskets
Every unorganized laundry room is plagued with one thing: ugly detergent containers. If your space is filled with plastic liquid detergent jars and colorful dryer sheet boxes, these have got to go — or, at least, be hidden away. If you want to remove the containers altogether, you'll need to decant them. This means removing the products from their containers and placing them in more functional and aesthetic jars. Organize.Clean.Decorate says that decanting permits you to keep products out in the open, which makes them easily accessible. Decanting also lets you easily see when a product is running low and needs to be refilled.
iHeart Organizing adds that baskets can then be used to hide unsightly items that you don't use as frequently — or, if you don't want to decant, you could place your detergent bottles in baskets as well. A tray could corral clutter and if someone in your family typically has a change in their pockets, add a piggy bank to the space as well. Emily Henderson says to pick and choose what should be hidden away in a basket and what should be decanted. She says, "bring in containers (like pretty utility baskets) to corral everything and ... decant what makes sense into clear containers to bring down the visual clutter," according to Style By Emily Henderson.
Find a place for every item
If you have extra space in your laundry room, you may want to store items other than just laundry products. For instance, Emily Henderson keeps cleaning and office supplies in her room. If you're going to follow in her footsteps, you'll need to make sure that everything has a designated storage space. She says, "Each cabinet and drawer has to house something very specific. The tall cabinet is for brooms, mops and our vacuum," per Style By Emily Henderson. Smaller drawers hold things like tools. This will make it much easier to keep your home organized and find what you need.
If you're completely remodeling your laundry room, Henderson suggests adding cabinets and floating shelves, per another Style By Emily Henderson article. When doing this, you'll be able to store ample cleaning supplies in the cabinets while keeping your baskets or decanted laundry items out in the open. This will also allow you to use as much vertical space as possible. You could also place labels on your cabinets and drawers. In Henderson's words, "I also love labels and get immense satisfaction from placing an object in the drawers in which it is "supposed" to go. I'm a person who needs systems." If you feel the same way, it's time to break out the label maker or tape and a permanent marker.