Laundry rooms accumulate stuff. By default, winter blankets and carpet cleaners end up cluttering the shelves of even the most pristine laundry room. Complicating the situation for us is the fact that our laundry room is on the entrance level of our home, directly opposite the front door. Keeping it clean may have been a priority years ago, but all we do now is shut the door when we have guests.

After 14 years in our home, it looked like this.

 

Steps to decluttering are simple.

1. Empty the room (or closet, or shelf) completely.
2. Clean/paint the empty room.
3. Sort everything into 4 piles:
   1. Keep
   2. Discard
   3. Donate/Sell
4. Return the items from the keep pile back to the room.

In this instance, we threw away a ton of things that weren’t useful to us any more. We also made a large donation of blankets and towels to the local animal shelter and we would up moving a lot of the things from the keep pile to other more suitable locations.

For our laundry room, we wanted to make it more of a cleaning closet – a place to store all of our cleaning supplies instead of having them scattered throughout the house. This will free up spaces under sinks and in closets that we had been using for storage of cleaning supplies.

Here’s the video showing how we did it.

To stage the room for buyers, we organized the supplies into baskets. We’ll probably add a bouquet of flowers or some other homey touches when the time comes. Here’s the final product:

What about your home? What parts of your home need a little decluttering?

 

Staging and Decluttering is a new video series produced by Team Zuhl. Prior episodes include:

Staging and Decluttering your Hall Closet