Small Laundry Room

A lot of us have or have had small laundry rooms.  You know the challenge of a small laundry room.  Nothing like climbing over clothes as you come in from the garage with no place to hang your coat.  Sometimes the laundry is even tucked away in the bathroom or stuck in a small hall closet.  Did the builder think that clothes were not going to congregate in the hallway?!  Actually, most didn’t think about it at all.  This is why I have gotten so many requests for Laundry rooms and why I have spent so much time planning them.  They’re a space that is usually secondary when planning a home, but are one of the highest use spaces.  We need to be enjoying our time in the Laundry room.  Maybe then it won’t feel like a chore!

 

 

In our last house, it was the entry from the garage, the coat closet (the house had none-crazy, right?), the laundry room and the cleaning supply closet.  That’s a lot of stuff for one room to handle.  Let alone it was a small laundry room.  We lived with the front loaders placed side by side for four years, when I couldn’t take it any more.  I knew I could plan it out so much better than what the builder did.  The top of the dryer had become a landing zone and I was tired of trying to keep it organized, let alone we hardly had any storage space.

 

 

Step one was to stack those babies!  They make two brackets to attach the dryer to the washer-really simple.  You don’t want the dryer falling on anyone!  Once you stack the washer and dryer, you have a better idea of the space and how it might function differently and more efficiently.  Because our room was an entry and we had small children.  It made sense to create a bench and a place to hang coats and put our shoes.  (We don’t wear them inside…it keeps the floors SO much cleaner!)

 

I knew that I needed additional storage, so I had a deep cabinet made for over the dryer.  This is where I was able to store extra blankets and things we didn’t use often.  Over the bench, we hung the 42” wall cabinets high, because I didn’t want anyone hitting their heads on them.  It also opened up the space visually, because the upper cabinets were not at eye level.  I figured I had a built in stool with the bench too, so the placement height didn’t bother me at all.  Here I stored cleaning supplies, laundry supplies, and things like light bulbs and general things for the house, that might normally go on a shelf in a coat closet.  Those upper cabinets provided A LOT of extra storage.

 

 

My feeling is you can never have enough storage in a small space.  Okay, maybe you are one of the lucky ones with a huge laundry room, like this photo below.

 

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Even though the room was still a small laundry room, it functioned so much better and felt so much larger, by stacking the dryer.  It didn’t meet you right as you walked in to the space.

 

 

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I have become a fan of stacked units for small laundry rooms.  In a client’s project, there wasn’t the budget for front loaders, but she was able to find an affordable stacking top loader.  Now, she has floor to ceiling wall shelves for a pantry, plus space to store her laundry basket.  She didn’t have either her kitchen before.

 

In the next couple of months I’ll be sharing another laundry room.  While it is not small, it has a lot of great space planning and features.

 

What do you struggle with in your laundry room?  Do you have a small laundry room?  What solutions have you come up with?  I can’t wait to hear how you have solved your laundry room issues!