Laundry Room Organization & Before and After Pics

I tackled Jessica Fisher's Zone Defense challenge for the month of April.  This month's zone was the laundry room, and boy did my laundry room need help.

Before

All the laundry in this picture is clean.  I don't put dirty clothes in the laundry room because it's just too small.  But everything was a wreck.  I needed to organize, not just for my sanity, but to lay the groundwork for a project that w're going to tackle in our home.

In the next few weeks, we're going to start taking down all the wallpaper in the kitchen.  The plan is to paint the dining room, the kitchen, and since the kitchen is attached to the laundry room, this whole area will be painted too.

I hate chaos, so to make the project easier, I knew I would need to reorganize the laundry room and the kitchen too.

Step 1:  Get all the clean clothes out of there.  My "system" is to wash and fold 2-3 loads of clothes every day.  With five of us, including a pre-schooler, a toddler, and a self-feeding infant, we go through tons of laundry.

Step 2:  Pull out and Purge.  Get everything off the shelves and out of the cabinet so that I could see what I have.  Toss what I don't need.   The biggest challenge with my laundry room is that I live in an old, charming, 1940s era house.  While I love my house, storage can be a challenge because there are no linen closets.  We do have a garage instead of a carriage house, fortunately, but it's detached.  My husband has to keep some tools in the house and we need to keep some basic gardening supplies in the house too, especially this time of year.  I've fought this concept for years, but I decided recently to embrace it and simply add more shelves to the laundry room to accommodate.

Step 3:  Clean and wipe down all surfaces.  

Step 4:  Put everything in containers, when possible, and label everything.

Step 5:  Put everything on shelves or in the cabinet, with only a few essentials out on top of the washer & dryer.

After

Now this works for me.  It's functional because my husband can keep his tools readily available, but everything has a labeled home now.

We have a large wooden rod that he'll hang in the laundry room too, attached to the shelf, so that I can pull things out of the dryer and hang them immediately, but I don't see a point in putting the rod up until after our painting project is complete.

Hopefully this'll be the last time you see this old wallpaper up.  I'm ready to start tearing it down!

What organizational projects have you tackled lately?  Do you have any tips for keeping the laundry room clean?