The Laundry Room and Mud Room

Laundry and mud rooms are probably the most rewarding places to organize because whatever we do to make life easier for ourselves there will flow into the rest of the house and save time.  In these rooms, we need to find a place for dirty, wet and bulky items that will still be seen and easy to reach.  

Most new homes are built with cabinets in both rooms.  Cubby hole storage makes sorting clean laundry and supplies easy.  It is also nice to have cubbyholes for each member of the family so they can put their laundry away.  Front-loading appliances allows the top of the machines to be used for folding laundry.  The room should have practical and functional storage as well as look good.  Furniture can be substituted for shelves, cubes or cabinets if need be.  Anything with a surface and storage is good, bookshelves, etageres, sideboards are all good.  Use your imagination, and you can even move an unused piece of furniture from another room in the house, and it can become the new utility piece of the laundry or mud room.  Tables are nice in these rooms because we can always use a work surface for folding laundry, sewing, wrapping or sorting.

Baskets in a laundry room are very helpful to store small items. 

You can store cleaning supplies, clothespins, miscellaneous items you pull from pockets, all in containers.  Some containers you might use are canning jars, cookie jars, canister sets, plastic storage boxes and wood crates.  The easier they are to clean, the better.

A place to hang clothes while they dry is helpful as well as a place to store rags and dirty clothes, sheets, and towels waiting to be washed.  Pegs, racks, and stands are useful items to have in the laundry room and mud room to store wet things, shoes, jackets, and bags.

If you have lots of room, a bulletin board or chalkboard for family information and notes and mail slots are nice too.  A dream mudroom would have a sink, a towel bar and hook, a basket for pet sundries, a can

for pet food, a bench and a table for laying things as we come in the door.  This is also a good place to store firewood.

Keeping your laundry room and mud room organized can be very rewarding because it will keep dirt out of the rest of the house and make your cleaned laundry feel cleaner.

THE CLUTTER CLEANSE (PART TWO) How-To

There are a few ways to de-clutter our homes.  The first way is to purge.  This is the easiest, cheapest and most obvious. To do this, we go through with garbage bags and boxes and select everything we have not used, enjoyed or noticed for the last 2 years and put them in the bags and donate them to a good cause.  In Part One I told you why you should de-clutter your home.  Today I will get down to the nitty gritty and see how.   Purging is not the only way to de-clutter.  Just because you haven’t worn a dress for 2 years does not mean that you won’t want to wear it next week.  You can still keep artwork after you run out of wall space and you can keep toys that a child has outgrown.  The secret is to organize and use your creativity and/or to have adequate and clever storage solutions.

Alternatives to Purging   Furniture and accessories can double as storage and clutter control.  If you choose your furniture wisely, it can add aesthetically, functionally and add storage to the room. We can use space wisely and add storage.  Thinking outside the box can bring creative and unusual solutions.  One of my favorite ideas (because I love to learn) is to turn a dining room into a multipurpose room with library shelves and books.  This would maintain your dining room and give you a cozy nook to study and read.   Creative solutions are available as well.  Do you have thousands of books that you enjoy, but tend to clutter the house?  Cover them (see the picture with the giraffe) with book covers that unify.  This allows you to keep your books and declutter at the same time. Anytime you can unify the look; visual complexity will diminish.   Something that is just taking up space in one room can serve a useful purpose in another.  You may consider how you can repurpose something instead of throwing it away.   By adopting new habits, like seasonal cleaning and review, organized rooms should be easy to maintain.  Many of us keep health or spiritual journals.  A household journal is helpful in keeping information and going back to see what works and doesn’t work.  I don’t know about you, but when I change where I put my Christmas decorations after 20 years, I better write it down. Otherwise next year I may never find them.   Next, we’ll begin a room by room walk through with suggestions and ideas for managing your home!

THE CLUTTER CLEANSE (PART ONE)

Visual Complexity

Minimalism, clearing space, and decluttering are all quite popular right now, and there’s a good reason for that.  Clearing away and decluttering your space can help to eliminate stress.

We have detoxes; spiritual cleanses, and now we have a clutter cleanse.  There have been many studies that show that visual complexity has an effect on our feelings.

We react to sensory stimulation.  Sensory information comes from sight, sound, touch, taste, and smell.  Any of our five senses can be over stimulated.

The important thing to understand in your home is our stimulation threshold.  That is how much is too much or not enough.  Reaching a healthy balance is important.

We are limited to the amount of information we can process.  We can experience overload in a cluttered space.  This overload causes stress.

The tricky part is that we all have different thresholds. Under stimulation can cause anxiety.  If we have been living in an environment with high stimulation, then we may have adapted and enjoy the arousing and pleasurable environment.  It would take a lot to overstimulate us.

The following graphics illustrate the results.

Over Stimulation / Stress

Under Stimulation / Anxiety

Balance

Visual Complexity

If we’re overstimulated in our workplace, we will probably relax better in a home that has less visual complexity.  If our career has us in a very sterile environment, we may look for more complexity to offer intellectual and spiritual stimulation.

People with attention deficit disorders will not have the same threshold as an individual who requires less time to understand and retain information.  There is also research and theory that an effortless attention can restore the capacity to pay attention.  The best example of this would be to draw ourselves to nature in our surroundings.

If you want to determine if you have a high threshold for visual complexity, look at the following homes.  Which one are you drawn to?

The first has a good deal of visual stimulation.  The second blends with the environment and would offer less visual stimulation.

Many elements add visual stimulation to space.  “Stuff” is one of our bigger problems, kids toys, mom’s books, dad’s video games, these all add to visual complexity when left out.  Furniture, accessories, window treatments and wall hangings, as well as lighting, can add to the visual complexity.