Home Design

Now, in the past few months of my becoming obsessed with the blog world, I have seen some absolutely amazing laundry room transformations. I'm talking about ladies ripping out shelves and installing new cabinets, building risers for washers and dryers, replacing flooring, and on and on. You guys really do amaze me.

Having said that, I completed a laundry room makeover of my own a few months ago, so I thought I'd share. However, my "makeover" was really just an organization project and really isn't all that exciting, so don't get your hopes up! Mkay? :)

This is what it looked like on closing day.

The walls, shelves, and trim all received a new coat of paint before we moved in, but that's about all that got done.

Before I started my little project it looked like this... prepare yourself. LOL

Insert cheap slasher movie sound effects here.

And... after:

Added a little organization via banana leaf baskets on the top shelf. One holds my little boy's breathing machine and supplies, one holds nothing but lightbulbs (tons of them), and the last one holds our iron and spray starch - because it rarely gets used.

On the more accessible shelf, hidden behind the curtain, I have my heavy duty cleaners that I don't want down low, detergents, stain removers, and a few crafts supplies for the kiddos that I also do not want down low. ;)

The curtain is hung with a simple pressure rod. What could be easier?

I brought some iron wall hangings out of storage (that I'm not too fond of anymore) and hung them in here. I thought it needed a little wall decor, and I didn't want to hang these out in the main house. LOL.

Simple makeover, but it just goes to show that even small changes can have a dramatic effect. :)

TGIF- we survived our first week of kinder here.. Yay for that!

Let me start by saying that when it came to storing my gift wrap, my organizational skills were...well, non-existent.

For the past two and a half years that we have lived in this house, I have kept all of my gift wrapping supplies in a corner of our closet in our Master Bedroom.

Why?

The only answer I have is that the day we moved in, that was where it landed.

And that is where it has stayed.

Not only was it an ugly, cluttered mess to look at, but most often, I didn't even know what I had back there. So when it came time to buy a gift for someone's birthday, I would also buy supplies to wrap it...not realizing that I already had everything I needed back in the deep, dark depths of my closet.

But not anymore!

Check this out...

Ahhh...

Makes me happy!

Like many of you, we receive the Lowe's Creative Ideas Magazine that comes in the mail. The one that came in December featured a project that I immediately jumped on...

with an end result that looks like this...

And with project details like this...

it was a no-brainer.

We already had almost all of the necessary supplies, so the $85 cost estimate came way down.

We started with a sheet of peg board that was doing nothing more than collecting dust out in the garage...

I think it had probably been sitting out there for about two and a half years (yep - ever since we moved in), but it was left over from back when Will built his workbench and used peg board to hang up some of his tools and gadgets. It was no longer the prettiest or cleanest sheet of peg board, but with a coat of paint it would look good as new.

We did not follow the Lowe's guidelines on size. We had a specific spot in our laundry room where we wanted to hang it, so using all of our available space became the goal. Ours measures roughly twice as big as the one in the Lowe's magazine.

Will added supports to the back to make the peg board more rigid...

Then I gave it a coat of paint and waited for it to dry.

I used one of my favorite colors:

Benjamin Moore - Stratton Blue #HC-142

We bought three cafe rods at Lowe's that were less than $3.00 a piece.

(This turned out to be the only thing we had to buy for the project - everything else was already here.)

Once the peg board was dry, we laid it out on the table to measure out the best positions for the rolls of gift wrap...

We attached the cafe rods with the included hardware...

then hung it up on the wall, screwing through the perimeter frame behind the peg board and into the studs in the wall.

And then it was just a matter of going through all of my gift wrapping "stuff" and organizing it all to fit. We already had a box of hooks, so I pulled out what I needed and got to work...

Instead of buying cute, wire baskets like they used in the Lowe's version, I opted to use craft bags hung on a hanger to hold all of my cards and tissue paper...

It's not that I wouldn't have liked cute wire baskets, but the goal was to use what we had, not buy more. And as it turns out, the bags work perfectly...

As for gift bags, I saved only the ones that I actually thought I would reuse, and hung them in place. The rest got thrown away.

(I'm not one for saving bags that we get as gifts. I know that many people choose to save all of the bags and tissue that they get when they receive a gift, but I wonder how much of it they actually reuse? The bags that I chose to keep have come from Ellison's birthday's and I think they're pretty darn cute, so the possibility of reusing them is very likely...now that I can find them!)

I had no idea that I had this many balls of ribbon!

They all fit neatly onto small hooks...

A pair of scissors, so that I am never left searching for them...

Plenty of tape...

And three rolls of gift wrap that fit the season and my mood...

snowflakes

polka-dots in cool colors

and craft paper

The cafe rods simply pop out when you need to get the paper down or change out a roll.

I love that it takes up almost no room!

Using vertical storage is a huge space saver...

All I can say is...

it's about darn time we got all of that gift wrap out of our closet!

Not only will it be a breeze to wrap a gift now, but I am one step closer to having an organized closet that I actually enjoy walking into.

So I'm curious...when it comes to gift wrap, how do you keep it all organized?