Another Home Update

This one is probably even less interesting to anyone else, but I have to brag a little and I don't think I've done it yet.

Our little house is on the lot backwards, so instead of walking into the living room, guests have no choice but to enter at our laundry room. This is not ideal, but it's nothing we're able to control right now.

Initially, the laundry room was two side-by-side machines and a single open shelf -- which collected a bunch of our stuff, but was disorganized, ugly, and just a mess to welcome people.

Before:

Ugh. I do not miss that look.

For a few months, we lived with a temporary fix that in retrospect wasn't too much better...

Yeah. We just covered it with a curtain. Okay, it was a little less messy to walk into... but it still wasn't good.

After a few months of hunting, we finally turned up some stacking machines in our price range (thank you craigslist) and did a machine swap. This gave us basically half the laundry room for machines, and half for a new storage cabinet.

After/Now:

My amazing father built this storage unit from one of my rough sketches and it is perfect. The three upper cabinets each are just large enough for a laundry bin (one for baby stuff, one for towels, one for our clothes), with room to store things on one side as well as behind the baskets. There table portion you can see just at the bottom of the picture is on glides and actually rolls back into the cabinet when we're not using it for folding or stain treating. Under that is a big cubby that holds the litter box and a trash can.

(True, entering the house to a litter box isn't the nicest feeling either -- but this means we were able to get a dining table, so for us the trade off is worth it. It also means we clean it more regularly, which I'm sure the cat is appreciating too.)

I'm in love with the storage unit -- and I'm managing to fold the laundry directly from the dryer, so no more massive piles of clean laundry just waiting for attention. This has been a complete change in how we do laundry, but it is such an improvement. Thanks Dad!

Later
Having lived with this a few more months, I'm even more in love with it. The clean laundry isn't getting folded quite as quickly as it should be, but this still keeps us organized, and gives a central place for keeping clean spit rags and swaddle blankets for the babe. The curtain is still balled up at the top of the shelves -- only because I haven't had the time to take it away. There is just enough room between the machines and the shelving unit to store our air drying rack -- on the rare times when we put it away; these days it spends most of the time outside drying diapers! 

I thought I was making the laundry room better for the sake of our entryway looking better, but now that I'm doing 2+ loads of laundry a day, I realize that I did it for me. Fortunately, it worked out for both looks and functionality. Woohoo!