We all want an adorable, organized laundry room that makes us feel thrilled to fold towels.
Well, I can’t promise the towel thrill, but I can tell you how to have a functional laundry room that doesn’t trigger your gag reflex.
First off, here’s a guide on how to declutter for total beginners if you need a general lowdown on the basics and some key strategies. Otherwise, let’s dig into the laundry room!
How to declutter your laundry room (step-by-step)
Here’s a strategy for tackling your laundry room by category. If you follow the steps in order, it should become less overwhelming as you go.
1. Garbage
To declutter a space, we love to start with a trash sweep. Bring a garbage bag or can and throw out obvious garbage, the years-old mending pile you’re never gonna get to, empty detergent bottles (combine duplicates and throw out the empty ones where you can). Keep going until the trash bag.
“My laundry room is such a disaster I can’t even think.”
If your laundry room is an actual disaster zone–where you can’t walk through it, you have no idea what’s even in there, and there are years of piles stacked everywhere, this is what I recommend:
- Grab an empty laundry basket and a trash bag.
- Trash goes in the bag.
- Items that you want to keep but that belong in a different area of the house go into the laundry basket.
- Work until the basket and bag are full.
- Throw out the trash and put away what’s in the laundry basket.
- You’re done! Repeat this strategy daily or weekly until your laundry room doesn’t overwhelm you, then you can move on to the rest of this list.
2. Laundry detergents and cleaning products
If you’ve got a whole library of laundry liquids and potions, it might be time to whittle down.
Collect all of your products into one spot.
Combine duplicates (identical duplicates–don’t make your own concoctions, please).
If you have products you hate using or just never grab, look into donating them to transitional living facilities, or passing them along to friends and neighbors.
Only keep the products that you love and use regularly.
Wipe down the containers and arrange them neatly on their designated shelf.
All-Natural Laundry Powder Recipe
Bonus: Here’s the homemade laundry powder recipe I use in my house. It costs about four cents per load, and cleans better than store bought liquid detergent (in my experience).
Ingredients:
- Baking soda (3 cups)
- Washing soda (3 cups)
- Epsom salt (1 cup)
- Sea salt (1/2 cup)
Instructions:
- Mix ingredients
- Store in container
- Use 1 tablespoon per regular sized load
3. Clothing pileups
Many of us use laundry rooms to store seasonal clothes, “between size” pieces, and clothing items that we don’t actually want to wear but–for whatever reason–don’t want to let go of. Let’s deal with the clothes in here.
First, throw a load of your dirty clothes washing.
Second, if you have more dirty clothes, stack them in piles in front of the washer so you can keep them rotating while you work.
Now evaluate the items you STORE in here. Clothes the kids have outgrown, your winter coats and accessories, the mending pile–all those little stacks of clothes that have built up and become a permanent part of the room.
For the easiest route, you can dump all of this into a donation bin. If you haven’t worn it all the time, you probably won’t!
But if you don’t want to get rid of it, it’s time to sort. Keep it simple with “keep” and “donate” piles.
By the way: It’s okay to take several days on one of these steps–just focus on the category at hand until you’re done. Trying to do it all in one day can lead to burnout and a bigger mess than we started with.
4. Baskets and hampers
Do you have a stack of laundry baskets you don’t even use?
Are you keeping hampers because you think you need them, but they kinda just get in the way?
One of the easiest ways to manage laundry is an old trick Rachel used to talk about–instead of hampers, have everyone throw their dirty clothes directly into the washing machine. When it’s full enough for a load, run it. That’s it.
No baskets, no hampers, no extra places to store clothes. That’s as straightforward as it gets.
And of course, this affects how you shop and the clothes you wear–stark whites wouldn’t last long in this system, for example.
If you’re not ready to live that way, that’s cool! Just take this time to evaluate your hampers and baskets and see if some of them are cluttering up more than they’re helping.
5. Random categories
The laundry room tends to hold lots of odds and ends that don’t have a place in your home. Categories I see most frequently in laundry rooms include:
- Pet care items
- Cleaning supplies for the rest of the house
- Non-clothing items “waiting” to be cleaned or repaired
- Gardening and yard supplies
My recommendation here is to choose a category, collect everything in that category into the middle of the room, and sort from there. Work until the category is complete, then move on to the next.
This strategy gives your decluttering efforts logical flow, closing “loops” by completing the category instead of feeling like you’re swimming in an endless sea of clutter.
6. Deep clean
With everything cleared out, it’s time to clean! Deep clean your machines, vacuum out the exhaust tube for your dryer. Wipe everything down, dust, clean the windows, sweep and mop, and enjoy your lovely new laundry room!
Up next: Top Tools to Make Laundry Easier–Simplify Your Laundry Routine.
