With six children, Ronda Batchelor knows laundry. Disgusted by the inefficiency of her laundry room, she took matters into her own hands. With only $400 and a lot of ingenuity, Rhonda created one of the most efficient laundry rooms ever.
Ronda had to work with an eight-by-eight-foot room. While it’s nice to have a separate room for basic laundry, you’ll be amazed at how much she was able to fit into this small space. She used a stacked washer and dryer configuration to save space.
She noticed that the children each have their own laundry basket and are responsible for taking their own laundry to the laundry room, bringing it at least once a week. So she equipped the room with deep sorting bins. The children are expected to do their own sorting.
Ronda runs the washer and dryer, then puts the clothes in their respective baskets/drawers, which is just great. All of the kids have to retrieve their clean clothes from the drawers, which can be easily taken out and carried to their respective rooms.
This family has a lot of clothes that can’t fit in the dryer, so they added homemade sliding dryer racks, made from pegs and mesh you can find at the Dollar Store or in an old laundry bag, and made the frame around them. Each one is a drawer, and it slides into the wall. And get this: There’s even a fan in the back of the area where the drawers are for drying clothes. It’s controlled by a switch on the wall that is automatically set with a timer. Awesome!
She installed a faux marble countertop (it’s always nice to have a countertop in the laundry room!) and gave it a glass-like finish using an epoxy resin. By opting for the faux marble, the countertop is lightweight and easy to remove, which is handy if and when they need to access pipes and connections in the laundry room.
There is a hanging bar above the counter with lots of hangers and plenty of room to hang clothes.
But wait, there’s more! Ronda didn’t want to forget about having a place to iron clothes. She added a folding ironing board to the wall that is hidden by the cabinet doors when not in use. When fully lowered, the ironing board even swivels!
The outside of the laundry room has a barn-style door that slides out of the room and has a window in the top half with the word “Laundry” on it. It’s an old, reused door (one her son found and used for a haunted house). She planked the outside wall to make the fixture to hang the door look better. So cool!
Her husband notes that every time an idea like this hits his wife, they go looking for items and parts at thrift stores, garage sales and even dumpsters. As a one-income family with six children, they have to find a way to make it work!
They have a room where they can saw wood, etc., so it helps to have a place to do the work.
