The Monumental Task Of Organizing My Laundry Room

    I pride myself on my honesty in this blog.  Some may rightfully argue that I am brutally honest (as I am in life, not just this blog).  I want to write the way that I live my life.  I am not perfect, ohhhhh very far from.  I am however trying. Everyday I am trying to make a better life for myself and my family.  There are days that I do better, there are days that I do worse.  I am a loving mother and a semi-loving wife (it depends on the kind of day I'm having and how much my husband has bugged me that day).  I am not a natural born housekeeper.  I would love a clean house, but am unwilling / unable to put the effort forward.  Actually I would like to wake up in the morning and find that house cleaning fairies have struck and my house is immaculate.  I think the opposite might actually be true.  I am pretty sure that the dump fairies visit my house and proceed to turn the house upside down, generously sprinkling the whole thing with dirt and garbage.

    What makes the whole mess thing all the worse is the fact that our house is roughly the size of a shoe box.  Add to that the fact that we have way too much of everything (and that includes kids).  I am convinced the secret to my house being clean is organization.  I sound like a deranged broken record constantly saying to Christopher "We need to organize every single inch of this house."  I am convinced that the key rooms are the laundry room and the basement.  I have said this and have said this, but never acted on it.  I have a huge "board" filled with "organizational" ideas on my Pinterest.  I am inspired, but generally not enough to act on it.  ALL OF THIS HAS CHANGED!

http://www.imperfecthomemaking.com/

    I began to clean that awful mess of a laundry room first.  I had visions of it looking like something from a magazine.  Something like the above picture that I stole from Kelly and her blog "The Complete Guide To Imperfect Homemaking".  Kelly is a local girl who has more children than I do, and they are all younger than mine, and yet she has a gorgeous, tidy home (at least in the pictures that she shows on her blog).  To say that I am envious is an understatement!  I really recommend that you click the link I have included and check out Kelly's blog.  My finished product does not look anything like Kelly's.  It is just really the first stage.  It turns out organizational products are not inexpensive.  I decided to get a little at a time.

    I am really happy with the way that the laundry room turned out.  It's not something out of a magazine, but neither is the rest of my house.  I am crossing my fingers that it will work the way that I want it to.  The main function of the laundry room now is of coarse laundry, but it also acts as a mud room now and a pantry.  In the past the kid's jacket's lined the stairs going to the basement making it unsafe.  Their boots and hats and mittens clogged the entry to the house, making it dangerous around the stairs, and embarrassing if anyone came in.  The heating register was so stacked with wet mittens that no heat could come into the kitchen.

My After Shot

    My "after" is not pretty, but it is going to make life easier, and isn't that what it's all about?  I just have to re-train the kids to take their boots off at the side door and carry them to the laundry room.  It sounds easy, but well, we'll see.    

My after shot

My before shot

    The above addition to the laundry room is the thing that I am most proud of.  It's a shoe rack.  I had to go to several stores to find this shoe rack, and it was not inexpensive... but it does exactly what I want it to.  Now the kids can put their wet mittens on the shoe rack and they will dry.  More than that, (if I can train them to do it), if they put their mittens on the rack when they get home, we will have no more school mornings with children frantically looking for their mittens.

    I am really happy with my hard work, and let me tell you that it was hard work.  Every time I walk past the laundry room I get a goofy smile on my face.  I now want to organize the rest of the house.  The room is still a store all, but now it's a tidy store all.  It's a mud room, it stores my cleaning supplies, it has the sheets for my room, extra bedding, it's a pantry, oh that tiny space is many, many things.  What that space is no longer, is a mess, and that makes me happy.