Laundry Room Organization & Design in Austin

The laundry room is the smallest room I work in and the one that gives back the most per square foot. It’s also the one nobody has ever consciously set up. Two machines went in, a shelf came with the house, and everything since has been improvised.

Small room, one job

Unlike a kitchen or a garage, a laundry room does exactly one thing. That makes it easy to get right and strange that it so rarely is. Almost every one I see has the same faults: detergent stored where you can’t reach it while holding a basket, nowhere to set anything down, and a growing colony of items that have nothing to do with laundry — light bulbs, dog leads, a vacuum, half a toolkit.

The five things that have to happen here

Sorting, washing, drying, folding and hanging. If the room can’t do all five, the ones it can’t do end up on your bed or your dining table, which is how a laundry problem becomes a whole-house problem. So the first thing I work out is which of the five your room is failing at, and that’s almost always folding and hanging, because nobody gave them a surface or a rail.

Surface and rail

A folding surface is the highest-value change in the room, and in most laundries it costs almost nothing. A counter over a front-loader, or a board cut to sit across the machines, turns a room you pass through into a room where the job actually finishes. A short rail or even a tension rod gives shirts somewhere to go straight out of the dryer, which removes most of your ironing.

Detergent, and everything pretending to be detergent

Laundry supplies expand to fill whatever they are given. In practice you use three or four products regularly and own eleven. Those three or four go at eye level, in front, decanted only if it genuinely helps you see the level. Everything else — the specialty stain treatments, the bulk refills — goes up high or out of the room. Nothing on the floor, because the floor in this room needs to stay clear for a basket.

The Austin part

A lot of Austin homes put the laundry in the garage or a hallway closet, which changes the problem. In a garage, heat degrades detergent and anything scented far faster than people expect, so it wants to be stored inside and carried out. In a closet, the door itself is usually the most underused surface in the house — an over-door rack takes supplies off the shelf entirely and gives you back the depth you were missing.

How it works

A laundry room is rarely a standalone visit. It’s a half-day, and most often I fold it into a larger job in the same house because it would be silly to charge you a full day for a room this size. If the room needs real cabinetry, a counter or better lighting, that’s the interior design side.

More on how I work is on the organizing and interior design pages.