All Sorted Out

As I mentioned earlier, I'm trying to go through the house and take it from just moved in to organized bliss. I tackled the laundry closet last weekend and put the finishing touches on this week.

Here's the unsightly before picture. As you can see, when I unpacked, I just randomly placed things on the shelves. It had gotten really out of control and was becoming impossible to easily get what I was looking for without something falling on my head.

(Sorry for the awful pictures...laundry closet in a hallway with no natural light=very difficult to photograph!)

I emptied the shelves, wiped them all down, then laid shelf liner. I love the LifeLiner clear shelf liners. They are ribbed on the bottom to help them not slide all over the place and the top is smooth and easy to wipe down. Then, I sorted through the cleaners and got rid of/relocated anything I didn't use.

Once the shelf liner was down and I'd purged, I shopped my pile of plastic organizers and baskets that I've collected over years of teaching and from our old house. I decided to go with basic, plastic baskets because it's a laundry closet and things are bound to get dirty..er, linty?... after a while. The plastic baskets are nice and easy to wipe down.

Now the fun part...putting it all back! I made one basket for cleaners, one for rags + the iron, and one for trash bags and Clorox wipes. I stored all our bulk items on the very top shelf, out of the way. You'll also notice I added a basket to the top of the washer for dirty rags. I was just plopping them on top of the dryer until I could do a load of rags, but let's face it...having bleach rags next to all of our clothes just didn't seem like a good idea. ;) I'm not 100% happy with the way the basket is working out because it slides to the side when the washer is going, but until I think of something else, it'll have to do. Any ideas?

Hubby hung a wire rack on the wall for my most frequently used cleaners and underneath that we put the plastic bag organizer.

On the opposite wall, the previous owners had installed (and graciously left behind!) a hanging organizer that I put all my mops and brooms on. I slid the ironing board next to the hanging organizer, to the right of the picture.

The previous owner had painted the walls this happy shade of green. I hung up my "Suds" wall decoration as my finishing touch. Done! Whew!