The Dresser Upcycle Pinterest Is Loving For Clever Laundry Basket Organization
Old dressers can be one of the most cumbersome pieces of furniture to discard or store, with many being quite large and heavy to move around. You can also be hesitant to toss that old dresser, due to sentimentality, age-worn beauty, or previous functionality over the years. Pinterest is abuzz with a great solution that not only allows you to save your dresser and put it to good use once again, but also to tame the laundry and hamper mess that can befall many bedrooms, bathrooms, and laundry rooms. By making a few modifications to an old dresser, you can create a fully functional laundry station that is not only spacious, but sports a convenient work surface up top for sorting and folding.
Even better, you can easily retain the look of the original dresser on the exterior, as well as desired elements like existing drawers, drawer fronts, and hardware. It's a stylish and inexpensive alternative to purchasing a new hamper system or sorting station, as well as a great way to keep an old dresser from languishing in a garage or landfill. It's also a great DIY project if you find a cute dresser at a thrift store, antique market, or estate sale that you don't necessarily need for storage but simply must have in your home.
Creating a laundry station from a dresser
To create a laundry sorting station, you will need a dresser of any size. The larger the original dimensions, the greater the amount of storage and hamper capacity of your new laundry unit. While there are a number of ways to approach this DIY, most begin with removing the drawers and hollowing out the interior of the dresser of its inner wooden slats where they traditionally rest. Many DIYers employ a jig saw to remove these pieces, but many will also break apart easily with a hammer or mallet. You can choose at this point whether to leave some of the drawers on one side or at the bottom for additional storage. Note that unused drawers can be repurposed for all sorts of projects, so you may want to hang on to them for another DIY.
After you have removed the interior, the simplest version of this great DIY involves creating a surface inside the dresser for laundry hampers to rest on. You will need to use an existing or built base on the bottom of the dresser that creates a deep shelf for the hampers. Wicker laundry hamper baskets are available in several sizes from retailers like Target and IKEA, so you will have to measure and find the right ones that fit your dresser. While many tutorials employ a long horizontal dresser, you can also do this to a more vertically-oriented dresser using a single wide or two narrow hampers.
Other variations of this DIY
A more complex version of this DIY includes retrofitting the existing bottom drawers of a unit with additional wood to form deep bins that can accommodate removable canvas laundry liners. The drawers work using the existing slides on the bottom drawer as well as a new set of slides up near the top. You can then reattach the existing front pieces of the drawers to the new deeper bin to retain the dresser's original look. This is a particularly stunning approach if you are already planning to sand, stain, or paint a dresser and want to use it for more covert laundry storage that hides your hamper completely.
A more utilitarian and bare-bones approach that is perfect for a laundry room can be simply adding wood slats to each side of a dresser interior to support basic plastic laundry baskets that can be removed. Just add 1-inch pieces of wood screwed to the sides that allow the plastic baskets to hang by their handles for an instantly organized laundry room. For easy maneuverability, add some casters to the bottom of the unit to roll it where you need it.