Art Room/ Laundry Room

When we bought our house, I loved the over-sized (at least compared to what we were used to) laundry room with the extra set of kitchen cabinets in it.  I thought it would be great to have the extra counter space and cabinets for folding laundry on top and for storage underneath.  But over the last four years, the counter tops have become a catch-all spot, collecting clutter and leaving the room feeling chaotic and unorganized.  And as the kids have grown and gotten into art, their art supplies have taken over the cabinet and drawer space.  So the cabinets really weren’t working for me because most things were just thrown on top or shoved inside.  And if you’ve been reading my blog for any length of time, you know I LOVE organization.  I like everything to have a spot, a home, a place to go.  So lately, I have really been brainstorming.  I wanted a way to store the kids’ art supplies in some sort of neat, organized, kid-friendly fashion and I also wanted them to have a place to create, play with play-doh, paint, color, cut, and glue besides on top of my brand new kitchen table.  Ikea must have been inspiring, because after getting home, I figured out just how I wanted to do it.
So it took some a bit of convincing (he’s getting offly tired of all my “little projects” lately. haha! ), but I finally convinced Tim to help me pull out those cabinets and turn our laundry room into an art room/laundry room.  Here is the before shot (I almost forgot to take the before picture!):
clutter, clutter…


And here are the after shots.  Tim did an awesome job hanging all those shelves for me.  And I LOVE THEM!  I might even be a little giddy about them.  There were times when I think I about drove him bonkers with my insistence that every shelf and bracket had to be perfectly straight and all lined up.  But don’t they look amazing!  All the brackets and the short shelves are from Ikea and the long shelves are from Lowes.  (We didn’t make another trip to Ikea, I have a brother that was headed over from Atlanta, so he stopped by Ikea for us and picked up the brackets we needed.  Thanks Jason!)

My insides jump up and down in excitement every time I look at all the colorful buckets, storage boxes, and organizational bins.



Having some of the art supplies in buckets makes it easily accessible for the kids and easy for them to put everything back away.

We hung a cork board up on the opposite wall to display favorite art pieces.


The little tables and chairs are also from Ikea.  (During our trip to Ikea, we had picked up one table and three chairs, thinking we could have a little art area somewhere in our kitchen.  But once we decided to use the laundry room for an entire art room, we realized we needed more table space.  So some good friends that were making a trip to Ikea right after us kindly picked up some extra tables for us.  Thanks Brendan and Courtney!)  I spray painted the chairs fun colors.  And I have one more chair still in the box for Hudson when he gets bigger.


I love that the art room is right off the kitchen.   So while I’m cooking dinner or making lunch, I can keep an eye on the kids while they’re busy playing and creating.


And since they’re not working and making messes on the kitchen table, I can be a little more relaxed about it being cleaned up right away or in time for meals.  I also don’t worry about markers, crayons, or play-doh messing up their tables.  For one, it’s an art room, so that’s going to happen.   And two, those tables only cost $7.99, so it’s no big deal.

The kids love their new art room.  They literally played in there for hours after they got home from pre-school today.  When I was tucking Tyson into bed tonight, he asked me if he could play in there all day tomorrow and not come out at all.  haha!