Happy New Year! Today I thought I’d feature our new laundry room on the blog! I think I want to do a series where I do a baseline tour of each room in our new house, and then show how each one changes as we have more time, energy, and (most importantly) money to devote to the space. Our laundry room is one of our most simple spaces, and I’m so happy with how it functions given how little we put into it.
Here’s a little view of what our laundry room looks like from the dining/living room. We actually went with a pocket door due to a miscalculation I made when designing our house. It was supposed to be a wooden barn door, but the white pocket door was a perfect accident. We almost always have the door open, and I love how seamless it looks with the rest of the wall.
And here’s what our pocket door looks like when closed.
Our laundry room can be kept completely open since the pantry entrance is just a cased opening, no door. As you can see, we went pretty basic in here! Since it was a more hidden space (when closed off), we wanted to use our dollars elsewhere.
Just inside of our laundry room, we have our dirty laundry area. I’m a big fan of keeping everyone’s laundry in their own bedroom hampers. In this basket, you would only expect to find towels, cloth bibs, cloth napkins, etc. Whenever I do mine or Brandon’s laundry, I’ll throw whatever’s in this basket in the wash, too. The only exception is now we have a dust mop and mop heads, and those need to be washed separately. BTW – this basket is very dirty and a little broken. But that’s life!
I’d like to get a new laundry hamper or wire drawers at some point that can hold 2 or more types of laundry, is easy to clean, and has a surface of some sort that can hold our laundry detergent, iron, and clothespins. Here’s a cost effective option from Target, but TBD what we end up with!
BTW – the cheap wooden tv tray in my picture is almost 10 years old! I’ve had it since college, and it’s always doubled as a nightstand or desk. You might notice some metal behind our little laundry stand, and that’s our capped off dryer vent. We went with an LG washer dryer combo, and we’re so happy with it. Since it’s ventless, we just screwed a cap on our dryer vent to keep air from blowing in or out (not sure which way it goes lol). We also just have one collapsible laundry basket that we keep in the laundry room. It’s just used for folding/putting away clothes, so it’s not allowed to hang out in bedrooms for more time than it takes to put away laundry. I like this rule because it keeps us from hoarding baskets of clean laundry in our rooms!
Next up, our laundry sink area!
Originally when we designed our laundry room, we were thinking cabinetry with a nice sink, plenty of storage, etc. When the numbers came in, we went with this utility sink option instead! I’m so glad we did. This sink gets a lot of use! Since our coffee machine is on the neighboring pantry countertop and no longer hooked directly into a water line, we rinse/fill it each morning in our laundry sink! This is also where we wash our hands versus keeping hand soap on the island. I love how easy it is to rinse our baby’s bib and then hang it on our drying rack.
Note that we’re currently trying out bar soap. I know it’s more environmentally friendly, and I do like the look of a bar of soap over our plastic bottles we just have from SoftSoap lol. There’s also a souvenir hockey cup on the sink ledge. We use that to water our plants, and it’s my hope that someday I replace it with a cute pitcher that can sit out and double as decor!
As you can see, we keep our cat food in the laundry room. We plan on moving our cat door to be under the laundry room sink so the cats can have direct access to our bedroom without us having a cat door on our bedroom door that’s pretty open to the whole house. (If you’re wondering where their water is, we keep it in our bathroom so dryer lint doesn’t get in it!)
Here’s more of a straight through view! I love having our drying rack in here. As you can see, we use it to dry baby bibs, and we also keep a hand towel hung on it since we wash our hands in the utility sink. Behind that is her baby tub, which ideally would stay in our bedroom closet or eventually her bedroom closet. For now, this is where it lands sometimes!
Enhancing this room is at the bottom of our to do list, but I’ll recap some of the things I could see us doing in the next year or two. For starters, I think we need a different laundry setup so we can keep our towels/cloth napkins/etc separate from the dirtier dust mop heads. We definitely need to install our cat door, which could be fun since it’s a little wood toned mini front door with a brass knocker! Also – we’ve painted the whole house white but this is one room where I could see us doing a different color just to switch it up. The white walls make the washer/dryer stand out, and I think it’d be fun to make this room a little darker just so it blends into the background more.
Well, I hope you liked our super simple laundry room! Stick around if you want to see the more exciting parts of our home!
Davien
fluted wood & marble 
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