Getting the laundry room ship-shape for spring will be a SNAP with these very clever hacks. There’s something for everyone too. Woodworkers can go all out with Ana White’s Laundry Basket Dresser plan, pictured above.
If you’d rather keep your tools in their chest, check out this super simple idea from Craft Blog. A ‘blob’ of hot glue was used to attach clothes pins to a tiled wall to hang dry those little items that get stuck in the dryer and come out damp. (Instead of glue, I’d opt to used 3M’s hook and loop picture hanging strips, especially on drywall.)
One of the best laundry room investments I ever made was a ironing board hanger. Although it works great, it isn’t as charming as The House of Smiths’ creation.
How about turning an IKEA BYGEL towel rod ($1.99) into a clever place to hang all those spray bottles that seem to collect in the laundry room? I like the little ‘catch-all’ on the right too.
Although this next entry is a store-bought item, I thought it needed to be included in our round up as it’s TOTALLY DIYable. Some 1″ x 2″ (or so), pulleys, doweling and rope and we’re good to go. I particularly like how this rack is elevated, unlike the ubiquitous fold up/fold down kind.
And now for the second half of our round up…suds and stuff!
We’ll start at the beginning: pretreating. Tipnut did the heavy lifting for this part of laundry day. Click here for all their pre-treater recipes. And for stain removal tips, click here and here.
Sandy takes us step by step through her recipe for laundry soap as well as her tip for storing it. In this case a glass canister with a labels made out of chalkboard contact paper. Brill.
If you’re looking for even more recipes for laundry soap, we need only turn to Tipnut, again. In this case they’ve rounded up 10 homemade laundry soap recipes.
Of course, we don’t want to forget the fabric softener. Hallee hooks us up for this one. Her recipe consists of hot water, baking soda and vinegar. Her concoction even works in one of those Downy ball thingies!
Re: fabric softener made out of Baking Soda and Vinegar:
Well, once the vinegar and baking soda react, you end up with Sodium acetate, which is really just a kind of salt. I have no idea what benefit this would have on clothing. I have in the past just used vinegar (back when we had one of those Downy balls), but now we don’t use anything, just some of those plastic anti-static dryer balls, and we don’t have any problems. Saves tons of money and better for the environment (we’ve been using the same dryer balls for about 10 years, and have only had 2 fall apart on us.)