PROJECT: CLEAN HOUSE, Day 1-Laundy Room

After cleaning out the pantry, I was on a roll today so I decided to tackle the laundry room. Let me just start off by saying that the laundry room is the door that we enter in/out of on a daily basis since we come in/out through our garage. It is a multi-purpose room in that it holds our shoes, coats, washer, dryer, dog food and water and dog kennel. It is also the place that I stored the leftover paint from painting the office and the dining room, where we keep the vaccum and the steam cleaner, the stand to hang dry clothes and all of the diaper bags. Usually there is also a hockey bag or two and Kanin's backpack for school.

Since I do at least 3 loads of laundry a day, most of the time the laundry room floor is covered with dirty clothes because I will empty the laundry baskets from the bedrooms onto the floor so that I can fill them back up with clean clothes from the dryer. It is a never-ending circle in which I try to remind myself of how blessed we are to have so many clothes. "There are a lot of people in this world that only have one outfit to wear over and over" only makes me less annoyed with all of the dirty clothes for a few minutes.

So, this is going to be a no-holds-barred post in which I will literally "air out my dirty laundry" and show you what it has looked like.

Please excuse some of the pics. I have dedicated myself to not using the Auto-Function or the "P" function so that I can figure out how to actually use my camera.

This is where we kick off all of the shoes.

Notice the big container of winter coats, hats, etc. I brought that to the laundry room thinking that it would help organize all of the winter clothes.

Horrible picture but notice how the cabinet above the washer won't close?

This is where I stuck all of the left-over paint.

I am embarrassed to say that I had the most shoes in this pile: April-9, Scott-4, Kanin-4.5 and Gracie-1.

I removed all of the cleaning rags that were behind the laundry detergent on the bottom shelf and now the door closes.

I stacked all of the towels over on the bottom shelf of the other cabinet.

I hung up all of the coats that we wear on a routne basis, stacked all of the diaper bags up, took the excess paint and supplies down to the basement and lined up the paper towels.

I let each of us have 2 pairs of shoes in the laundry room and the rest were carried upstairs to our closets.

The Final Product: