Laundry Room - Design on a Dime

While searching Pinterest,  I've stumbled across so many amazing laundry rooms.   It makes me laugh to search for "small laundry room" and have pictures show up with laundry rooms ten times the size of my really, truly, small laundry room.   Anyway,  I created a board of inspiration for our laundry room and you can see it here. This is the mess I was working with (don't judge!) - this is real life  :)

Goodness, what a mess!  Our washer/dryer is located behind two bifold doors.  It's more like a laundry closet.  As you can see there is some attempt at storage, but it fails miserably.  My goals were to complete the project on a dime - spend as little money as possible;  group like items together in a more organized fashion; and give a little sense of style to the room.   My initial thoughts to 2 paint thick bold stripes in the area with leftover kitchen paint & find stylish storage  :)

I started by enlisting the help of my best friends, Sally and Angie.  Our idea of a great girls night out is helping each other with a project.  Angie's basement remodel is on our list, but she wasn't quite ready to tackle it.  We dove in head first - uh in some cases literally - for this project. 

We started by completely emptying the room and cleaning from floor to ceiling.  It's nearly impossible to see everything you are working with unless you do this step!  Purge items you don't need - it's much easier when you have help to discard items - you don't have time to think about "when" or "if" you will need an item in the future.   NEXT,  group like items together - I grouped in the following categories - cleaning, DIY, outdoors, lighting.

And after... you can see each crate has a chalkboard with the items within that crate.  I kept the blue cleaning caddy by itself  because it is used on a regular basis.  The black cube storage piece - we already had &  it contains all of our auto cleaning supplies.   The basket on top of the dryer contains items we use on a regular basis to complete laundry:  detergent, dryer sheets, stain remover, iron, etc.   Overall,  it looks so much better!!   As you can see, I did NOT paint the stripes I initially thought about. The crates came unfinished and Sally had some leftover stain from a project - we used it to give a splash of color to the area.  

The crates were on sale this week at our local AC Moore for under $8.00.  I have to admit I was pleasantly surprised by their size and durability.  I bought two and Sally gifted me two for my birthday.  The total cost for this project was under $20.00  I'm really pleased with how it turned out! 

We reorganized my pantry/small storage room too & I'll post it later!