the final reveal

It seems that the year of 2013 was my organization year. Not by choice, necessarily, or at least, not intentional, but I did many projects around here that really needed to be done. Some of them were painting, some were changing things completely around, and others were simply reorganizing a room

I need to get picture of the rest of what we accomplished, but for today I’m going to show you my laundry room. Needless to say, I do A LOT of laundry! 22 – 25 loads a week. We also have no coat closet, for the door leading into our home comes right into our dinning room. And with all the shoes, coats, snow items, and the like that we have for all the souls in our house, we need a mud room of sorts.

I am horrible at taking “before” pictures, but I found a few that are somewhat recent, to give you an idea of what our laundry room looked like before.

As you can see, not the most fluid of organization. You can see the floor in the first picture were those foam puzzle-like flooring, which covered up the hospital-like vinyl tile that we first put down 9 years ago when we moved into this house.  It was coming up in various places and the subfloor was rotted by the back door.

  Needless to say, the room not only needed an up grade and organization to better use the space, but the subfloor itself needed to be replaced.

And this, my friends, is what you let your 9 year old son do when it’s time for bed and he has too much energy.

The wall above my washer and dryer was a good sized wall, but I needed more than 1 shelf. So I measured and came up with the dimensions of a wall sized cubby unit.

We put this up after I painted the walls and trim (you can see a part of this cubby in the photo below).

Before we could do anything else, we had to replace the sub floor. That was an interesting ordeal. When the room was added onto the house, the subfloor was put down and then the walls were built. Yes, it was a bit odd. So Adam cut around the perimeter of the room to get the old subfloor up (at one point, he cut a water pipe. Oops! That took a good point of a evening to fix.)

Then we put a new subfloor down. Since we didn’t want to put down tile, which really was our only option with the in floor heat we have in that room, we decided to just paint the subfloor and call it good. 

Since I wanted to make the laundry room a type of mud room as well, I needed a place to hold the children’s shoes (and with 7 children who walk, that’s a lot of shoes!). Adam built me a floor to ceiling vertical cubbies shelf, to hold the shoes and the bench is nice for putting on and taking off shoes

He also built me a table so that I would have a place to sort the clothes, but I also needed a place for the clothes baskets to be (for I did NOT want the baskets along the wall under the window, as they are in the 3rd picture from the top). So I came up with the idea of having a space under the table for both the tall baskets  and a space for the small round baskets to be. The best part? Adam used an old table that was languishing in our garage for my new table. Score!

And here is the result!

Adam’s tools are easily within reach and organized, while the cleaning supplies are kept together (right above the sink) and the laundry soap is right above the washer.

The dryer is where diapers are changed.

The red basket at the very top is where I put the clothes that are out grown.  When it’s full, I organize them and put them away in the correct tote, which are all kept out in the garage.

Everyone’s jacket, except Adam’s, are kept here .

This is a little bench that I picked up at Goodwill for the littles to put on or take off their shoes easier.

And the occasional coin that comes through the wash? They are now mine!

The conclusion? I am very, very happy with my laundry room and it almost makes me want to be in there.

Almost.

I am linking up to “Let’s Bee Social” over at  Sew Fresh Quilts and “Finish it up Fridays” at Crazy Mom Quilt.