Laundry Room Makeover: $5

 I wish I had bothered to take a before picture.  But, you see, I didn't realize that I was going to redo the laundry room until after I put in the first wash of the day and began to sweep, and to clean, and to organize.  The laundry room redo took even me by surprise.  So, if you are able, picture a very dirty white wall where that chalkboard wall now resides.  As you venture through the rest of the photos, try to imagine bare and scratched walls covered here in there with cobwebs.  If you look at the floor, you can probably imagine the walls.

 Now the chalkboard wall hosts the boys' morning and nighttime chores.  They will probably continue to ignore these instructions, but I will be unimaginably comforted by having written them down.

 A make-shift laundry chute.  This is actually an air-return vent into our bedroom.  Soon after moving here I realized that it was just a glorified hole in the floor perfect for shoving laundry down.  We call it the laundry hole.  Isaac and Sarah love to dangle their limbs down the hole and ask me to grab their feet and hands:  lots of fun.

 These shelves predate us.  We would never have attempted such a feat of carpentry.  IKEA would have had to do that for us.  A few years ago I junked the boys' dresser and moved their clothes onto shelves in the laundry room.  It saves me a whole lot of hauling around laundry baskets and keeps the boys clothing explosions contained to one room.  Underwear, socks and pjs in the milk crates; pants and shirts on the shelf beside; hoodies on the nails; and dress clothes on the shelf above.

 My first thought at putting up art in the laundry room was, "What?"  And then I thought, "Of course!"  That starry night you see is Jacob's and the winter scene is from one of Dave's former students who has since gone on to an art school in New York.  And where does the $5 price tag come from?  Those letters come from a large sheet of sticky decals that I bought at our local Stedmans.  The kids had already used the W,A,S and H that I would have liked to affix above the washer, so I was left with CLEAN.  The sentiment is the same.

 The second starry night is Hannah's.  I love the contrast of colour with those bare white walls.  Those paintings really make me happy to be in that room.  And I'm there a lot.  The broken dresser comes from Sarah's room.  We bought it when the twins were born and the top pulls out into a change table. This is the first time in 12 years that we have not needed a change table.  (Tears will squirt.)  I found a solid wood dresser on Kijiji and we picked it up last week and transferred Sarah's clothes into it.  We were going to bring the old dresser to the dump when I realized that it was perfect for the laundry room.  I had run out of A's and thus I used an upside down U with a pencil through it as the A in SOAP.  The arrow lets me know which soap is in use; strangely, I actually find this helpful.

 I happened to have the letters for DRY and so decided to use them above the drying rack.  I expect that the DRY sign will be of great assistance to the boys who still struggle when I ask them to get something off of the drying rack.

Proof that the chalkboard wall is in use.