How To Set Up An Efficient Laundry Room

While rec rooms are bound to get messy, and mud rooms are inherently designed to get dirty, the laundry room is where things go to get clean – so it’s an ironic wonder that so many laundry rooms are in such a state of dishevelment. Sticky detergent spills! Whites and colors tangled together! Cracked bleach bottles spilling onto dark clothing! And where did all those socks go, anyway?

Because most families aren’t hanging around the laundry room all day like they are in the kitchen and the living room, the laundry room – as necessary as it is – tends to get a little overlooked. Laundry rooms often end up disorganized, messy, and inefficient, with cleaning products placed haphazardly around the room and clothing piled on the floors or atop the machines. But your laundry room doesn’t have to be a headache!

To help you kick your laundry room into shape, we’ve compiled some easy tips for organizing and reworking your laundry room, below:

– Try to keep the top surfaces of your washer and dryer clear of clothes and cleaning products. When you go to do a wash, the last thing you need is to be unable to access your machines. Try to find a proper place for everything you need to store in the room, whether i bins, cabinets, or on shelves. 

– Don’t leave cleaning products and detergents uncapped, sideways, or loose on your shelves. While you’re busy loading and unloading clothes, it’s so easy for products to spill over, creating a sticky, soapy mess. Instead, keep your products upright and in plastic bins so that in the event of a spill, the mess is contained and easy to clean up.

– If you have the space, try to set up a bar or rack where dry cleaning can hang. This will create a designated spot to store incoming and outgoing dry-cleaning, as well as ensure that the delicate items don’t get mixed with the regular washes. 

– Laundry hampers are your friend! Don’t just dump your dirty (or even more blasphemous – clean!) garments onto your laundry room floor. Try to keep at least two baskets or bins in the laundry room, one for light wash clothes and one for dark wash items so that the two don’t get mixed up in the fray.

– When storing your cleaning products and detergents, try to keep the items organized in the order in which you use them, making it easy and quick to grab what you need and not go sifting through bottles. But beware: Don’t store any bleach products near ammonia-containing products (ie: window cleaner), as the chemicals when mixed can produce toxic fumes.

– Avoid wrinkles by tackling them immediately post-dry. There’s nothing more frustrating than taking a freshly dried wash out of the dryer, putting the clothes into a basket, and then by the time you reach your closet, everything is wrinkled – ugh!  Instead, consider storing a folding rack or table (an ironing board can double as one, too) in your laundry room. That way, when you pull your dried clothing out, you can immediately and quickly fold everything right then and there, eliminating wrinkles and making transporting the clothing easier.

– If you have clothing that cannot be dried in the dryer, consider mounting a fold-out drying rack onto to the wall to make it easier to place damp clothes onto a flat surface quickly after taking them out of the washing machine. This will eliminate hazardous clothing drip onto the floor, as well as reduce wrinkling while damp clothing dries. 

The laundry room is for washing dirty clothing, but that doesn’t mean the room has to be dirty, too! Keep your laundry room clean, bright, and well-organized and you’ll find that laundry time isn’t such a dubious chore anymore.

What do your laundry room look like?