Pinterest Laundry Shelf

We have been cleaning up and cleaning out around here.  I hired a friend of mine with a cleaning business to clean for a few hours every other week in the "maintenance" areas (Kitchen, Dining Room, Living Room and Main Bathroom) so that I can get busy with the deeper clutter and organizational issues in our home.  With the time I gained during the summer I was able to...

• wade through two years' worth of school papers (we home school and I never knew what to save those first few years, so I saved EVERYTHING!)
• Clean out our storage room of boxes - some we have been holding since we moved in eight years ago!
• Organize much of what was left over in the storage room
• Organize our School Supply Closet 
• Build a Laundry Basket Shelf.  

This last project is the one that has made the biggest "daily life" impact.  Here it is:

I found this shelf on Pinterest one day, and thought that it would really help us with laundry. The link was to a blog post by Ana White. We didn't have that much room in our laundry area, so I followed her link to another size found here. Ryan agreed to build it with me, and tried to let me do most of the work.  I got to use all his power tools, which was fun!  It was great to do the project together and I have loved how functional it is.

We always had a problem keeping up with laundry. We have laundry baskets in each bedroom and it was difficult to know when we had a full load to throw in the washer.  We would always end up with all the baskets full.  Then, I would dump it out in a mountainous pile in the middle of the floor and sort through it.  We would spend days catching up.  It would always be so depressing to bring the baskets back to the rooms, just to have something else sitting on the floor that needed to be thrown in.  Now, each person is responsible to carry their laundry basket from their room every few days and separate their laundry into the bins. Whenever a bin is full, I run a load.

The original plans were for a wider shelf, with bigger baskets.  I didn't see the bigger baskets at Wal-Mart when I went shopping, so I bought smaller ones.  We had to adjust the size of the shelf, but I think the basket size is just right.  I did end up finding the proper ones at Target a few weeks later, but I personally like the ones we ended up with.  I also made one addition to the baskets. The little signs on the front:

I didn't want to be carrying all the laundry down myself every day, so I had to have a way to visually show where things go. The older kids can read the signs, and our youngest uses the pictures to sort out where her things go. As the kids get older, I will teach them to do a load when the basket fills up. For now, we have a much easier time keeping up with the laundry. We have had the system for about a month, and I have not had a mountain of laundry to separate since we built it.  An added bonus is that I have to pack for an upcoming trip and I don't have to catch up on laundry to be able to get that packing done.

I will show you the School Supply Closet next time, and maybe give a peek at the progress on the bathroom project that we finally have both the time AND the money to invest in.