Laundry Room Makeover

I love our house, but if I had one complaint, it would be that there's no mudroom. We have plenty of closet space, but the door to the garage opens right into the dining room. As a result, our dining room serves as a default mudroom, especially during the winter. It becomes a holding zone for coats, shoes, and anything that has to eventually make its way into the car.

Garage overflow

Our laundry room is in between our dining room and the entrance to the garage (laundry room door pictured above), but it also tends to be a clutter magnet. Other than holding our washer and dryer, it's essentially a waste of space. Stuff piles up in there like you wouldn't believe, probably because I can close the door and forget about it. The closet, the counter, the floor... it's all a mess.

Wasted space

Messy, messy

I hesitate to post my domestic disorganization on the internet for all to see, but clearly something needed to be done. And since I'm 7 1/2 months pregnant, I am in the mood to organize, improve and nest. Enter: Project Laundry Room Makeover.

Even though we don't have a formal mudroom, the proximity of the laundry room to the garage door makes it an ideal space to hold all our stuff. As we were trying to figure out how to re-do the space, we identified the following goals: 1) Get the clutter out of our dining room, 2) Organize the laundry room and the junk in it, and 3) Make the laundry room space more functional for our needs.

Here's the final product...

Voila!

Everything in its place 

Nice and neat

No more clutter!

We invested about $200 and an afternoon into the project. The bench and shelves were ready-to-assemble from Target, which we accented with fabric storage bins. We installed a piece of wainscoting behind the bench and framed it out with a piece of trim to make it look more built-in. And most importantly, we were able to purge a lot of junk while finding a place for everything to live.

We just finished today and I already love it. It makes the space so much more functional, giving us the mudroom we so desperately needed. And I've reclaimed my dining room from winter clutter!