Things coming together

Laundry is the BANE of my existence....seriously! I absolutely HATE it...I'm never even close to being caught up with it...and even when we do manage to get clothes though both the washer and the dryer, they sit unfolded in "clean clothes" piles. It's really rather ridiculous....

Then one day, I read about "the family closet". I can't find the original blog post that inspired me, but the pictures from the link should give you a good idea. I thought to myself...I bet that would make me at least a little less stressed about laundry...maybe even I could keep up with it sorta...So, when we moved one of my wants was a laundry area that could be turned into a family closet. And, I got my wish :)

The washer and dryer is in the basement, where I have plenty of room to create a closet...however, the space is completely unfinished...not even studs to hang shelves on. And the price of closet systems really add up. So, working on no budget at all, I started figuring out how I could create what I needed. I knew I wanted most of the rods low enough for my little girls to access, but tall enough at least for my shirts to be hung up. It had to be free standing. I need at least some shelves/drawers for folded things and boxes of clothes that are being hung onto for hand me downs or off season stuff. So this has been simmering in the back of my mind for a month now, and one morning I woke up with the solution.
We have 2 of these we'd used for pantry food in our last place (only ours are black...) They were sitting in pieces in the garage with plans to be used for fabric/craft storage. I decided my laundry organization was more important just now since we were working with a massive "clean pile" and "dirty pile" that I was desperately trying to keep from mingling in my basement and the reply to "I can't find any pants was" go look in the clean pile. (no wonder it takes us forever to get out of the house...) So this is what my black shelves look like now. (I think we will call this space "the dungeon"...)
Ok, you can see that I still have a lot of clothes to be sorted and put away, but I now have a place to put them! I even had an extra table to use as a folding table!
I started by taking the top two shelves for the older girl's clothes. I was just looking to get stuff off the floor, really, and turned up like that, they worked well.

Then I remembered these two closet rods I'd picked up at the DI. I took the lower shelves and left them the right way and then we zip tied the rods to the top for baby clothes and my shirts. Longer dresses are just going to have to go in the upstairs closet with Chris' clothes. The buckets I found today at Wal-mart for $1.50 each. My kids were always dropping the drawers out of the dressers in the past, so I think this will work nicely.

I'm really excited about my progress down here. This is the year I get my laundry under control!