Laundry Room~Deciding on the Plan

I hope everyone had a fun and safe 4th of July weekend! We had a great weekend with family and just said our goodbyes, so now it's back to reality... 

As I wrote back here and here we recently revamped our laundry room to function better for this party of five. It took quite a bit of thinking, planning and bugging my husband twelve times a day to hash out this design plan. It's a small space that needed to pack in multiple functions and must haves. I was worried I'd miss something function-wise since the entire reason we were re-doing it was because it did not function well. 

My 3 must haves were:

• A closet for the vacuum

I use the vacuum daily, sometimes multiple times a day, and I need easy access to it. 

• A hamper organizer Cabinet

We always had hampers around the house, stacked high in the laundry room, etc. We wanted a place for them to be stored, and easily accessible. 

• A hanging bar of some sort

We are not tiny people. There is no room for clothes shrinkage in this house. I hang dry a good amount of clothing and I wanted a place where I could do that. 

I went back and forth many times considering adding a laundry sink to this room. We had a giant one in the corner, where our laundry drained, and was it inaccessible most of the time because of the fold-down shelf that was used for extra storage. Inevitably about every 6 weeks, the lint trap mesh sleeve would get clogged and I wouldn't notice until it had moved slightly and covered half of our laundry floor with water. Fun times. 

But we could only fit so much into this little room and we ultimately decided on forgoing the sink and putting one in the garage down the road. Our boys practically need to be hosed down every time we play outside {which is every day} and we thought it might be more practical to have them clean before they entered the house. 
 
This room also needed to provide as much storage as possible. In this little room, I wanted to have our paper towel storage, vacuums and attachment storage, cleaning supplies, pet supplies and laundry paraphernalia. 


In the garage there was a little niche area, about 2' x 30" that was just rickety shelving and totally underutilized that was right behind our laundry room. We had that enclosed to make a closet that was accessible from the laundry room.

Let's remember what it looked like originally. 

Below is the new closet being framed out and enclosed. 
There used to be a cabinet right there inside the laundry room, so by taking the cabinet out and enclosing the space from the garage, we gained an extra 2'x 2' just in the actual laundry room alone. 

 Progress

Up next: the progress on where it is today. There are still some finishing touches, but it's such a better space!!!