This weekend I started the 2020 Home Organization Challenge. I have done this challenge a few times in the past, the first being the 21 day challenge in 2011 and the last time being in 2016 though I didn't make it through every room and didn't blog about that one as much.
This was a tough one. I'm very glad that now that I'm in a house and have a baby this is a 14 week challenge instead of a 21 day challenge. There is no way I could complete that again with my current life.
My laundry room is also the primary entrance we use to get into the house (aka, the back door) and by some sort of magic it never gets really out of control but lives is a state of not quite clean and not at all organized. I followed the steps set out by the challenge kit and in doing so realized that the reason it lives in this state of just shy of chaos is because our shelves become a catch all for stuff we don't want to put in the garage/shed but don't really have a home for in the house either. We also just kind of stacked the leftover paint from when we bought the house in a corner in there so it was in a climate controlled space but it wasn't really organized.
So here are my before pictures
As you can see the shelves are piled with random things, the deep sink is in desperate need of a scrub (though it is still stained pretty badly, it is much better) and for some reason we have 8 folding chairs just hanging out in the laundry room. Also our ladder never made it to the shed after we cleaned the pine needles off of the roof in the fall.
This is the corner we stashed the paint cans in between our deep freezer and water heater.
And here we have more paint, and the ladder, and brooms and mops and a random box of books that I need to take to the little library at the end of our street.
Unfortunately the jogging stroller has to stay even though it takes up a ton of space in the laundry room. That is really the only place we have to store it and I use it frequently enough it can't really be shoved in the back of a closet.
And so after a day of pulling everything out of the laundry room into my kitchen. Scrubbing stuff down, throwing away 1 bag of trash and loading the car up with items to donate I now have a much more organized space.
(The ladder does still need to go out to the shed, but I couldn't find the key, so that will get done later this week.)
My shelves are neatly organized and only contain things that actually need to be in the laundry room. I do think I am going to put to gather a small in-the-house tool kit to keep on the top shelf over the deep sink. We can never find simple things like a hammer or screwdriver when we need them, then we run out to the shed to get one and it just gets put in a random place creating a vicious cycle.
You can't see it in this picture but all of the paint is on the bottom shelf of this unit, then I have any chemical stuff (bug treatment stuff from when we had an ant problem outside, weed killer, motor oil, windshield washer fluid, miracle grow etc) is on the second shelf. Paper towels and small kitchen appliances (Stand Mixer, Bread Machine, electric griddle) on the middle shelf, paper plates, plasticware, and extra laundry detergent are on the 2nd to the top shelf and on the very top I have our coolers and my husbands bike stuff (helmet, bike lock, tire pump).
Overall I consider week 1 of the home organization challenge a success. I eventually want to tear up the cracked tiles on this floor and either replace them or paint the concrete underneath. I also want to paint the entire room white and sand/refinish the metal pipes that run along the walls so that they really pop out in either a copper or rubbed bronze finish (depends on what they are actually made of, there are too many coats of paint over them now to tell). I don't know if any of my decorating vision for this room will ever happen since this isn't our forever home, but if we get another set of orders to Hampton Roads and stay here for a few more years I might go ahead and do it.
Happy Monday!
No comments:
Post a Comment