Optimize The Space In Your Laundry Room With This Clever IKEA Storage Hack

The place where you wash and dry your clothes might not be a main fixture of the home, but recently, organizing your laundry room into a relaxing, clean, and clutter-free space has taken the internet by storm. Instead of massive, brightly colored plastic bottles of detergent and half-used boxes of dryer sheets scattered about, people are opting for a more minimalistic and streamlined approach that makes this oft-dreaded chore feel more luxurious. If you have what's basically a closet instead of a dedicated laundry room, however, proper organization can be a bit of a challenge. Thankfully, clever TikTok creator @tanytml presented an option that can help you make the most of a small laundry room, and it only requires around $35 worth of items from IKEA.

Having a small laundry room might make the space feel cluttered and messy regardless of how tidy you keep everything, but in many situations, all you need is a bit of functional organization. This method allows you to maximize what you have available, even on a tight budget, and it doesn't require any tools or involved DIYs. 

To create your own shelving unit in the laundry room, you'll need two VESKEN shelf units from IKEA. In the TikTok video, @tanytml shares a smart tip that makes this hack possible: the pieces from one unit can be combined with another to create one super tall shelf. By doing this, you're able to double your storage space while still ensuring that it can fit in a tighter corner or small laundry room.

To combine the two shelves, all you need to do is continue building upwards instead of stopping. Once you've followed the direction for the first shelving unit with four sections, continue the patterns of placing four vertical pieces in the holes and topping with a flat piece. To make it easier, you can also choose to assemble both shelving units per the instructions, then place one unit on top of the other and press down to secure.

This IKEA shelf is recommended for use in smaller bathrooms, but as long as the dimensions line up with the space you have in your laundry room, it can easily find another use. It is 14 1/2 inches wide, 9 1/8 inches deep, and, when combined, 79 1/4 inches tall. This comes out to just over 6 1/2 feet, so if your door frames are the standard 80 inches, you should be able to assemble these shelves in a different room and slide them into your space without a hitch.

A major thing to keep in mind with these shelves, however, is the weight capacity. On IKEA's website, it says each shelf is able to support 9 pounds. This isn't much of an issue when you're storing laundry bags, dryer sheets, or scent beads, but large jugs of detergent or bleach can get quite heavy quite quickly. To avoid cracks and subsequent spills, make sure to check the weights of what you plan to store ahead of time.