Before and Afters of my messy laundry room

(alternatively known as, “The Post That Will Help You Feel Superior About Your Housekeeping Skills”)

You know how a lot of reality shows are designed to make you feel better about yourself (“at least I’m not THAT dreadful at parenting, or at least I’m not THAT unhealthy/fashion-challenged/younameit”)?

Well, this blog post may work that way for you.

You’re welcome.

There really was SOME floor space in there, I promise.

Ok, not a lot of floor space. Ahem.

The top of my dryer:

Fortunately for me, I have a top-loading washing machine (you remember it, right? From when I took it all apart?), so I can’t possibly stack any clutter up on there…I only have to deal with the dryer.

I’m pleased to tell you that after some hours of work on my part (cleaning, decluttering, and organizing) my laundry room is looking much better.

I feel surprised every time I walk in!

Remember the no-floor-space shot above? Here’s that area all cleaned up now.

Yes, I need to repaint the floors…my old monstrosity of a freezer was larger than this one, so switching them out exposed floor that we hadn’t been able to paint before.

Remember the messy top of my dryer?

I’d really love to have a cabinet/shelf/somekindofstoragethingy for this stuff, but at least it’s more neatly arranged now.

I’m so much happier with condition of the shelf above the freezer (see the next photo). I have space for my popcorn popper on the shelf now (no room in the kitchen…it used to be haphazardly shoved into a corner of the laundry room.)

Plus, my shipping supplies aren’t a toppling mess anymore (I save them when I get packages so that I don’t have to buy supplies when I sell stuff online.)

Also, I actually have some empty space on that shelf, which makes me very happy.

I don’t think I actually took a before picture of this next area (you can see a bit of it in one of the above photos), but it was bad…piled at least halfway up the wall with stuff. A lot of it was old clothes I’d saved to repurpose, and since the kids like to rummage through there and find material for their craft projects, it had become sort of disastrous.

I got rid of some clothes I wasn’t going to manage to repurpose (woot for Freecycle!), and organized the remaining ones. Then I put all the small-ish scraps that the kids can use into an old freebie bag, hammered a nail into the wall, and hung it up.

So, hopefully when they’re wanting to create something in the future, they’ll be able to find their supplies without destroying my neat basket. 😉

Those of you that have bought my ebook will recognize the skirt in the front. I somehow spilled bleach on it, so I need to re-dye it.

My laundry room isn’t a looker by any stretch of the imagination, but it’s so, so much easier to work in now that it’s cleaned up. I haven’t done such a thorough job of organizing and cleaning it for a really, really long time, and I’m hopeful that the degree of thoroughness means this change will stick around for a while.

A lot of times, people think that in order to organize, they need to go buy more organizing stuff…boxes, files, bins, racks, and the like. Sometimes, that’s necessary, of course, but often, it’s quite possible to bring about great change in a space without buying one new thing.

I didn’t purchase anything, and my laundry room looks far different than it did before. I just got rid of clutter and stored my remaining belongings more efficiently, and the cost for that is simply time.

P.S. It’s worth mentioning that even if you DO buy organizing stuff, you’re still going to need to invest the time!

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Joshua’s 365 post: Getting our Christmas tree! (a multi-picture post to make up for a few missed days)