Guest Post - 7 Simple Ways to Organize and Stage Your Laundry Room

When selling your home, staging it for viewing the best ways you can make a lasting impression to your potential buyers.

Leaving your home as-is isn't the best way to attract buyers. It would be best if you took the time to prepare your home for the viewing so buyers can see it under the best light (literally and figuratively).

From your bedrooms to your front yard, every part of your home will need a makeover, or, at least, a bit of organizing and tidying up. One part of your home that you might be neglecting during this entire process may be your laundry room.

Although the laundry room isn't the most glamorous part of a home, it's still a part of it. Plus, your buyers are going to look at it, whether you like it or not. Therefore, you should make sure that you took the time to organize and stage your laundry room.

If you have no clue how to do that, then here are seven simple ways to guide you on how to organize and stage your laundry room for a home viewing.

Clean and Declutter

When preparing your home to sell it off to potential buyers, no matter what part of your home it may be, you need to remember to clean and declutter. Since you're cleaning your home to sell it, you might also take the time to do a deep clean of your house instead of the usual. Of course, the same step applies to your laundry room. 

Your laundry room might have a lot of clutter in it due to poor organization. It might also have dust and dirt all over the place if it's a part of your home that you don't clean that often. Therefore, you should make sure that you take the time to clean and organize the laundry items.

If there are any items you're temporarily storing in the laundry room due to a lack of space, get rid of them. You can use organizational storage items to level up your laundry room's look.

Consolidate Laundry Products

If you are displaying too many different laundry products in your laundry room, it can make things feel messy, even if you organize them well. Therefore, when you're staging your laundry room, try and stick to a single type or brand of cleaning detergent. It should be a brand that works the best for all of your fabrics and stick to that.

Some people who want to go that extra mile are repackaging laundry products in separate and prettier containers. This extra step will undoubtedly make displaying your laundry products look more attractive to buyers. However, make sure that you label these containers, so you don't mix things up.

Consider Space Saving Appliances

It's understandable when washers and dryers occupy a large amount of space in your laundry room. However, this means that it's a lot harder to fit anything else in there. You might have to migrate your laundry products someplace away from your laundry room. Putting your laundry products somewhere else can be very inconvenient.

You can better your laundry room's situation by investing in smaller but efficient appliances instead. They still do the job, but they leave enough space to place your laundry products in the room.

That way, you won't have to move back-and-forth when you need to do your laundry. Plus, it helps you save space everywhere else in your home.

Make Your Space Visually Appealing

When you think of the laundry room, the image that comes to your mind likely isn't the most exciting thing out there. Visualizing laundry rooms doesn't give us the immediate Pinterest-home imagery in comparison to other places in the home.

Although that is the case, it doesn't mean that you can't make your laundry room more visually appealing. To do that, you can apply simple interior design rules to your laundry room.

One effective way to make your laundry room more appealing would be by sticking to a visual theme. For example, you can stick to a color scheme that applies throughout the laundry room. Adding a bit of decor or placing your laundry products in containers that match the theme will make it more appealing.

Making your laundry room more appealing will make it a relaxing place to stay. After all, doing the laundry can often be anything but exciting.

Put Clothes Away

When you're showing your home to buyers, the worst thing you can do when it comes to the laundry room would be to show dirty clothes. That's an awful idea for anyone. Nobody wants to see a stranger's literal and figurative dirty laundry out in the open like that, especially when you're trying to sell them something.

Therefore, you should ensure that you put your clothes away, including clean ones, somewhere far away. That way, buyers aren't reminded of the previous owners of the house, which can distract them from picturing themselves as the owners of the house.

Create a Place for Everything

To keep your laundry room organized, make sure that everything you'll ever need relating to the laundry room is there and has a dedicated place there. For example, you should have dedicated spaces for hangers that you're not using. Your laundry room needs a spot for your laundry products, and so on.

Having a place for everything makes it a lot easier for you (and other people in the home) to know where everything should be.

Create a Line and Folding Space

Not everyone is a fan of drying their clothes in a dryer. Therefore, you should create a drying rack where people who want to air dry their clothes can put them. A retractable clothesline is a nifty idea that gives you that drying rack while also being easy to put away when not in use.

Aside from an air-drying space, it would help if you also had a laundry room folding area. That way, all you need to do when you step out of the laundry room is put the clothes away afterward.

Conclusion

The laundry room is a crucial part of your home, but it doesn't get as much tender, loving care that it deserves. With this article's help, you can find a way to organize and stage your laundry room to appeal to you and potential buyers all-around.

Try them out and see just how big of an improvement your laundry room is going to make only by spending a bit of time and effort on its development.

Author Bio: Andrew is an NY-based writer who covers DIY home projects, cleaning, and organization. When not writing, he spends his time with his two rescue dogs, Jet and Rocket.

Guest Post - 5 Home Hacks to Save You Time and Aggravation

While cleaning up can be satisfying, some chores that are super irritating. They take too long, they make you crazy, or they are too much hard work for not enough return. Here are five ways that you can beat those annoying tasks and get on with your day.

Folding a fitted sheet

The process of folding a fitted sheet has caused even the most hardcore cleaners to throw up their hands in frustration. But, you don’t need to end up with a messy linen closet anymore. Luckily someone tried all the methods they could muster and came up with the best way to get those annoying elastics all put perfectly together to make a neat flat fold.

The breakdown is:  

• Grab the sheet by the short length and pull out the corners.

• Fold the corners together to create a pocket.

• Get the next corner and tuck it into the pocket you’ve made and then fold.

• Place on a bed with the elastic up and then fold that over into quarters.

It’s a little difficult to see abstractly without these videos, but take a look and you’ll get it pretty quickly. Now if only they could help you get a fitted sheet on by yourself without one of the other corners popping up!

Quick dry your laundry

Most people hate doing laundry because it takes so long. Especially the drying part. And when the washer is done and the dryer isn’t, well the process just gets more lengthy. Get your clothes to dry more quickly with this simple hack: put a dry towel in the dryer with your damp laundry Check on your laundry about 10 minutes before you usually would and you’ll see it dries more quickly.

Clean the gunk out of your blender

Love smoothies, but hate the chore of cleaning the sticky bits out of the blender when it’s done? Berry seeds and fruit particles are tough to get out and you find yourself rinsing and rinsing over and over to try to get it clean. Instead try this hack. When you are done with the delicious smoothie part, fill the blender container with hot water and dish soap, wait for a few minutes and then run the blender on high for about 15 seconds. Then just rinse and dry.

Polish your pots with a condiment

If the bottom of your stainless steel pots and pans get black and brown, it’s generally from a natural reaction with copper oxide. Scrubbing and scrubbing can be annoying, so avoid it. Spread a layer of ketchup on the bottom and the acetic acid in the condiment will corrode the copper oxide after about 30 minutes. Then, you can just wipe and rinse.

Stop rage cleaning your microwave

Avoiding cleaning the microwave has long been a favorite pastime. That’s because it gets so sticky and greasy in there that cleaning it seems like a futile gesture and even the best attempts are not very satisfactory in the end. Until now. Put a bowl of water and lemon juice in and run it for five full minutes. The evaporated liquid will get into the stains and make everything simple to wipe up.

These five chores have long been the bane of clean up time. With these simple hacks you will save time for what you really want to do: Netflix and chill. Haha, right, now there’s all that other cleaning to do.

Author Bio: Sarah Archer, Content and PR Manager for Your Best Digs. Sarah’s a writer who’s passionate about evaluating everyday home products to help consumers save time and money. When she’s not putting a product’s promise to the test, you’ll find her hiking a local trail or collecting new stamps in her passport.

Product Review - HangerJack

Organizing products typically over promise and are often simply too good to be true. Keeping that in mind we also dislike anything that hangs on doors or sticks out.

However, HangerJack’s Gator rack is a welcome solution for awkward items. We see a lot of challenges in the laundry room, especially in the drying area. Since hanging items aren’t cleaned all the time the normal solution is usually temporary, the drying rack. Yet, the drying rack still needs to live somewhere when not in use and it is not a great shape for storage. The Gator mounts to the wall and extends only when needed. Holding up to 50 pounds the arm goes out 24 inches. They mention areas of use including garages and decks, but I feel the Gator offers an easy solution in the laundry room. We see a lot of small spaces like NYC apartments or condos without laundry rooms and anything that creates space quickly is a welcomed improvement especially if it is easy to use. At the end of the day if a product isn’t easy to use you won’t. As an aside, while I was writing this I just figured out while it is called the Gator.