February is a short and cold but jam-packed month chez Biologist, so the smart Biologist picks her house battles carefully and with those limitations in mind. The second stop on my room a month tour is my Laundry Room.
This strange looking picture is a composite (it's hard to get a full on good shot because of the whole long/narrow issues with my house layout). This organizational embarrassment is my laundry area (it's not really a room -- more of a largish closet). You'll also note the server in the top right corner -- my poor laundry room also serves as our home network closet and houses not only the big honking server (nicknamed "gargantuan" because of its capacious harddrive room) but also a variety of satellite TV equipment and other miscellaneous home networking miscellany. And as if that wasn't enough functionality for one closet the top left part of space is taken up with some storage stuff.Over the years I make attempts at making this space better. The wire shelving, the shelving between the machines were part of those attempts -- and I'm happy with that stuff. My big mission in this space is not to refurbish (what I wouldn't give for a front loading washing machine!) but simply to get it cleaned up and more functional.
The goals for this space:
- Go through all cleaning products and discard any that I no longer use.
- Get all clean laundry (that pile on top of the drier is actually clean <sigh>) to where it belongs.
- Get the laundry in the bag with the blue markings taken care of -- this bag is my sweater bag of shame... mostly because I discovered some garments with, horror of horrors, moth holes. Anything in this bag needs to be washed, discarded or taken to the dry cleaner. I have some good sweater cleaning supplies from The Laundress that I bought last year to help me with this task.
- Sort through stored junk to make sure that all of it has a reason for being.
- Find a way to keep the server stuff organized and out of the way. I've resolved myself to the fact that this hardware has taken up permanent residence, but the monitor, keyboard (buried under clothes) and other things have to have a way of being stored neatly when they are not in use (which is most of the time... it's just that when John needs them, he needs them to be there)
Hmmmmmm! That little room seems like it will be a challenge. But worth the effort, when done.
It looks like all you really need are some cord tamers and possibly one more small shelf to put the keyboard on below it's current location (only about 3" below) so the it has an actual permanent home that nothing else fits into. As to cord taming, I like the velcro cord bracelets but a short length of PVC bracketed to the wall with the cords fed through does the trick more cosmetically. You really don't have a laundry room issue as far as I can see! Good luck!
I agree with Freda, as soon as you get the actual laundry under control you'll be able to decide what to do with the computer stuff. A shelf for the keyboard and cord-tamers might really be all you need to buy or build.
Is there any way to mount the monitor on the back wall?
Office supply stores have a great white zipper-style cord tamer system. We used one kit cut in half to tame all our PC wires and they look SOO much better. The benefit of these is you can remove a cord then rezip without unplugging and threading wiring. We've just completed a garagae reno, and storing things in big solid tupperware rather than cardboard also made a huge visual difference - now our junk looks much better:) Happy trails.
Gorgeous! My scrap patch is only two rows pinned, you are going fabulously.