How To Organize Your Laundry Room on A Budget

With rising real estate prices, space has become a luxury. That’s why homes are shrinking and so are the laundry rooms within them. If your dryer breaks down in the tiny laundry room, you’re going to have a hard time fixing it in all that clutter. You can search for “dryer repair near me” and hire a pro to fix it for you. For now, let’s figure out how you can organize your cluttered laundry room on a budget.

The Details

1. DIY drying rack – Sometimes, the dryer doesn’t have enough space to dry all your clothes. You can’t wait too long either since your wet clothes would develop a musty and moldy smell when not dried. That’s when most people consider air drying. However, everyone can’t afford those fancy collapsible drying racks. They aren’t efficient either since drying wet clothes over wet clothes lengthens the drying time. 

That’s where you need to apply your DIY skills and save some money for a better and more optimal solution. Buy a few 1×2 boards and trim them as necessary to fit across the joists in your basement laundry room. After that, use heavy-duty nails to fix those boards in place. Now you can use hangers to dry more items at the same time. Just make sure that your laundry room is well-ventilated to get that moist air out.

If you live in an apartment or a place where the laundry room isn’t in the basement, you won’t have any joists to nail those boards. Instead, you can hang a rail from the ceiling and use that as a drying rack with hangers. This kind of hanging rail can be made with plumbing pipes and allows you to maximize the space above. 

2. Fill those gaps – If you have a laundry room setup with small gaps in between the washer and the dryer or between pieces of furniture, don’t let that space go to waste. There are numerous ways to use those gaps. The best way is to get a slim rolling cart for storing detergents, fabric softeners, dryer sheets, brushes, and other such items. They are available online for around $20 to $30. You can further cut down the price by DIYing it with a few PVC tubes and boards.

If the gap is too slim for a rolling cart, you have many other options. For instance, there are magnetic hooks that can stick to the laundry room machines to provide some sock hanging space in between the machines. Otherwise, you can get adhesive hooks for sticking them on wooden furniture. Apart from socks, those hooks can also be used to store brushes, rags, bags, and more.

3. Create a laundry care guide – Most of the time your favorite clothes get ruined, or the laundry room becomes a mess when you don’t follow the care instructions on the fabrics properly. This is very common since those care symbols often don’t have descriptions and can be very confusing. For instance, the symbol for dry cleaning is a circle and that makes no intuitive sense. 

You can fix this problem by hanging a DIY care symbol guide in the laundry room. It doesn’t cost a lot of money. Just get a portrait frame with light or dark borders and print out a laundry care guide with large symbols and distinctive font. Put a bit of thought into it to make it appealing to the eye since you’re going to refer to the guide every time you do laundry.

4. Magazine holder for essentials – Your dryer and washer offer precious metal surfaces on all sides. If there’s enough space on the sides, don’t let it go to waste. Buy a magnetic magazine holder and stick it to the washer or dryer. The magazine holder acts as a rack for your laundry essentials. You can store laundry soap, baking powder, essential oils, laundry pods, and tissues on this rack. Pack it up with essentials and you’ll be using it quite often.

5. Hamper organizer – If you don’t have enough space for a large laundry room cabinet with numerous shelves and racks, you can use a cheap hamper organizer for organizing your clothes. They are a much cheaper and, in some ways, better alternative to baskets. Unlike baskets, these hampers can collapse when not needed.

They are made from fabrics instead of wicker material and are equally breathable for your dirty or fresh laundry. You can use the organizing hampers to separate your darks, whites, and hand-wash-only items and fold them away in a tight corner when they aren’t needed.

6. Wall-mounted drying rack and ironing board – Apart from the ceiling, you can also extend your drying space to the walls. However, you’ll need DIY skills for this one. This kind of drying rack needs a heavy-duty frame to support the bulky ironing board. The ironing board needs to be fixed with latches and goes on the wall when not needed. Behind the ironing board, you may have a wooden drying rack made from scrap wood from your fencing or other DIY projects.

7. Counter space – If you have a front-loading washer and dryer and both of them are kept sideways instead of being stacked over each other, you have a lot of room over the machines. You can turn that into usable space by installing a counter over the washer and dryer. While there are expensive counter options you can get for your desk, this one doesn’t need to be fancy or very strong. You can get a cheap countertop from Ikea for less than $70.   

Conclusion

A lot of things happen in the laundry room. From washing and drying your clothes to storing linens and fabrics. That’s why it’s important to use the vertical space and gaps creatively so that you can get more out of the existing real estate. On the other hand, if your dryer breaks down, you can search for “dryer repair near me” and hire professionals to fix it for you.