Laundry Room Planning

We have a great sized laundry room, but it has zero storage.  We've brought in a plastic shelving unit to help out, but the Willister can reach the bottom two shelves, which significantly limits the type of items we can put there... (we're talking unopened tissue boxes, toilet paper, and shoes... that's it).

We've been dreaming and pinning (look here for our laundry pins so far...) and although the mental picture of our finished room is by no means finished, we started in on the plans anyway.

I measured the the height and width of the room and drew up various layout ideas.

There is already plumbing for a utility sink on the far left of the room so we're planning for that.  The hook-ups for the washer & dryer are just right of center in the room, so we're sticking with the easiest plan and putting them as close to the hook-ups as possible.

We've decided to stack the washer & dryer to allow for maximum storage space.  We rarely fold clothes in the actual laundry room, so counter space wasn't too big of a deal to us.  We've also decided to add a pantry-like cabinet to store the vacuum, broom, mop, etc.

After all the rough sketches, I drew up a scaled version of the whole room.  (Feeling pretty proud of myself at this point...)  The right side will be the pantry, then the washer-dryer with a cabinet above, and two sets of cabinets on the side, with the far left cabinet holding the utility sink.  The skinny bar on the left was where we originally planned a rod to hang clothes, but we decided against it.  We tend to hang our clothes upstairs anyway, and we decided we'd rather have extra cabinet storage in that spot.

Then I priced out the cabinets at a few stores.  Any home improvement store will provide pricing and planning guides for cabinetry- easy cheesy.  

Pricing estimates for the five cabinet sets pictured above:

Home Depot: $609 (for basic, unfinished cabinets; toe kick, crown moulding not included)

Ikea: $1037 (for finished STAT cabinets; legs, toe kicks, crown moulding not including)

Those were the prices even before we nixed the hanger bar and decided to add another cabinet. Not terrible, but not what we were hoping to spend.  

We toyed with the idea of building the cabinets from scratch... but decided it wasn't worth the time and stress.  So we headed to one of our very favorite stores in hope of a steal: Habitat for Humanity ReStore.

The ReStore is basically a thrift store for home improvement that benefits the Habitat for Humanity organization.  They stock sinks, light fixtures, furniture, doors, trim, tiles, paint, hardware, and of course, cabinets!  They have rows and rows of cabinets, some individual, but many that are whole sets of old cabinets taken from kitchens and laundry rooms under renovation.  We scoured the lot of cabinets looking for a set that we could make work in our space.  We found the perfect set; it even had a pantry cabinet.   We had to rearrange a few of the measurements so that it would all fit correctly, and we ended up purchasing an individual unit to round out the set, but we made it work. 

And most importantly, the price tag was awesome.  We got all of the cabinets for just over $250.  Score score score....  We piled them into the trailer, (and the trunk... and the back seat...) and took them home.  

Right now we're in the process of paint prep.  Some of the cabinets were pretty greasy, but with some goof-off and a bit of elbow grease, we've cleaned them up.  We'll be replacing the drawer and cabinet pulls, but keeping and painting the hinges to save money.

I'm so excited to see how it will all turn out.  There are still a lot of decisions to be made: paint colors for the walls, hardware for the cabinets and drawers, and how to organize all the new storage that we'll have!  Hoo-hoo-hooray!

Any brilliant ideas we should include in our design?!