Before and After: A Cluttered Rental Laundry Room Gets an Efficient and Stylish Overhaul for $220

It’s easy to see how laundry rooms can quickly become disorganized. Clothes quickly pile up, and so can brooms, bottles of detergent, batteries, baskets, and other items that don’t happen to begin with B but still make their way into the laundry room, which is a frequent catchall for miscellaneous things.

Ellenor Griffin’s (@aneditedlifestyle) petite laundry room, essentially a closet with a washing machine in it, was looking, well… less than edited. She knew she needed to quickly make a change, so even though she’s working on revamping several rooms in her rented home, she decided to prioritize the laundry room.

“The space is the top of the stairs before you go into our basement,” she explains. “Because of where it is located, it usually became a dumping ground for everything … I knew I had to make a start on the laundry room so that I could start the others. I need to create storage and space so other things could have a home, and I could start moving things from other rooms to there.”

Her £200 ($218 USD) redo maximizes space and makes laundry look stylish, all while ensuring she still gets her deposit back. Here’s how she did it: First, she added a small wooden counter, made from a piece of faux butcher block, atop the washing machine. She also added two square frames in front of the boiler above the washing machine and filled the frames in with cane webbing — “the perfect material because it’s breathable,” Ellenor explains — to disguise it.

Ellenor says if she could do one thing differently in the project, she might consider making the frame and cane webbing detail shorter and tried to figure out measurements for adding a shelf above the counter. “In rentals, storage means everything,” she says — and especially in small spaces like this one.

“Once the frames and counters were in, the next project was to install the drying rack,” Ellenor explains. There two slight setbacks when she took off the existing panel with hooks and tried to hang a wall-mount drying rack. First, when she took down the hooks, she was surprised to find bare brick and newspaper (and not a finished wall) underneath.

She quickly patched up the wall, but then she was still worried about mounting a drying rack (that would then hang wet clothes) over top of that. “Because the house is from the Victorian era, the walls are so old that they could not support anything heavy,” she says. “Every time I tried to install it, the wall would come away.”

Her solution was to add a drying rack that descends from the ceiling via a pulley system instead. “I ended up DIYing this so I could have one that I actually like the style of, and it’s one of my favorite DIYs to date,” she says. “I also love that I have a place to hang washing and close the door on it, rather than having a drying rack in the middle of my home. Out of sight, out of mind.” (Ellenor’s creation is made from rope, dowel rods, liquid nails, and a long metal strip that she cut into two pieces.)

“The final DIY I created was making the box cubby to fit in the gap between the washing machine and wall,” she says. “As the washing machine also sticks out into the door frame, I really wanted to cover the side of it, and this proved an excellent opportunity to do so. It also allowed me to add some color, along with the screen covers.”

Ellenor selected a plum paint color (Farrow & Ball’s Preference Red) for the shelving and trim around the boiler cover. “I love it,” she says. “It brings such warmth to the space and looks great with the faux butcher block and cane webbing.” Ellenor adds that her color choice has inspired her to go bold in other rooms in her home, too. “Even though it’s tiny, it’s brought a punch to my interior style,” she says.

Lastly, Ellenor hung some super lightweight decor to the back wall that’s still practical for a laundry room: a shelf with pegs for a duster and a couple of baskets to store odds and ends. Her DIY enhancements led to big change (and big decluttering!). She now has added storage, a new drying rack, and a much more stylish space to boot.

“I’m proud that a few small changes made a huge difference,” she says. “I really like spending time in there now folding and cleaning. It’s my new happy space.”

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