Adding a Shelf to the Laundry Room

Well, we’re getting hit with a whirlwind of snow and I am LOVING it! In honor of this last winter hurrah, allow me to #throwbackthursday to another snowy day earlier this year when we got to go snow tubing! If you’re not in a place where it’s snowing, well, maybe you can live vicariously as we (Mitch and I, plus his mom, step dad, and sister) careen down the slopes in one big family tube…

Annnnnd because two trips down the mountain is more fun than one, here’s another for ya (this time a trio of individual tubes linked together):

Ok, back to business. 🙂 This week has been a laundry week. At least on the blog. There’s a growing pile in our actual house that needs to be attended to… but let’s stick with the fun stuff, shall we? If you’ve been following, you know our laundry room lives in our Spare Bedroom and used to be a white walled, gray door-ed space that was just a little blah.

Now, it’s bursting with color and spunk and even some baskets to keep it organized!

Oh, and our massive jar of DIY Laundry Detergent, plus a few extra odds and ends. Well, those odds and ends (and the detergent) had just been hanging out on the dryer for the longest time, because we had no other place to put them. And thus came the idea of adding another shelf.

We needed to have a place to put the things that were just perched on the dryer because it was getting to be a pain to move everything every time we wanted to turn the dryer on.

The trick was that this shelf couldn’t span the whole width of the space, due to the water hook-ups, so we couldn’t just build braces along the walls to perch it on like the top two existing shelves. Color me stumped… until we decided to hang shelves in the family room and I realized I could just steal that method and create a smaller version!

As that tutorial is available in this post and I just used the same method, I’m not going to go into the details of hanging the actual shelf. In terms of materials, I used the same supplies as the other shelves- two brackets from Ikea and a 1″x 10″x 48″ board (cut down to 31″ in length) to fit the space. The brackets got a coat of white and the shelf itself was painted the same as the others (Spa by Behr).

Once everything was painted, dried, and hung, it was time to fill ‘er up… the best part! After the basket and jar, there was still a bit of room, so I had some fun playing around with what else could go up there.

In the end, I think we have a good mix of function and a little style- the nick nacks just make me smile. Anything to help make doing laundry a little more fun. 🙂

I wanted the shelf to be a “perch” of sorts right above the dryer, so when installing it, I attached the brackets to the wall down behind the unit and almost out of sight all together.

I think it’s safe to say that the laundry room is a much happier space than before- I still don’t want to spend hours and hours there, but the chore now has its perks. 🙂

So this laundry week is just about finished… all that’s left to do is whip up something to hide the unsightly water hook up panel. Can’t wait to show you that project tomorrow!