Ronda Batchelor and her husband, Les, have six kids. Yes, you read that right. The children are ages 20, 18, 16, 13 (twin girls) and 10. Needless to say, when it comes time to do laundry for the family of eight, Ronda spends a solid day or two doing nothing but sorting, washing, drying and folding.
AFTER: Ronda recently decided to change her chaotic situation. Having worked on a few houses before, she had picked up some remodeling tricks. She carefully sourced discounted materials from her local ReStore location, which is Habitat for Humanity’s nonprofit home improvement donation and resale center. After that she built, spray painted, wired and installed everything in the new laundry room, which includes a folding table, smart storage and lots of bins for sorting and organizing. “I like things to be pretty and organized, but it has to function,” Ronda says.She says she spent just $409 and six months on the update.
Stacking the appliances freed up floor space for seven roll-out bins below the folding counter on the right, labeled for sorting whites, jeans, towels, delicates, darks and more. The kids now bring in their dirty clothes and sort them into the appropriate bin. Ronda washes the items, folds them on the counter, then turns around and places them into numbered bins, which the kids are expected to pick up, take to their rooms and put away, then return the basket. (Some share rooms and therefore baskets.) “They know that if they don’t return their basket in a timely fashion, then Mom is kind of grumpy,” she says.Ronda stole space for the recessed wired baskets — she calls it the “clean clothes tower” — from an unused cubby niche in her daughter’s room on the other side of the wall. She also recessed a cabinet into the wall to store supplies and a fold-down ironing board.
The laminate countertop came from a former island that was donated to ReStore. Ronda cut it to fit and then painted it to look like marble. A poured-on epoxy gives it a bit of shimmer. “It looks fairly realistic,” she says.She spent $30 for the countertop, glaze and paint.
To keep costs down, she bought the white baskets from a secondhand store and installed them herself.
The slim drawers at the top of the tower are for drying delicates. They’re lined with laundry mesh that Ronda got at her local dollar store. After a few weeks, she realized the delicates weren’t drying quickly enough, so she and Les installed a small, inexpensive fan from Walmart in the back of the box and wired it to a timer switch for better circulation. She can put sweaters and other delicates in the drawers and set the timer for up to an hour before it will shut off automatic
For the ironing board cabinet, she cut the back off a regular-size cabinet and recessed it into the wall. She then made the molding piece and attached it to the wall above the cabinet to make it look like a built-in unit. She built the fold-down, swiveling ironing board system herself from brackets and hardware she bought at The Home Depot.
The original door used to swing into the laundry room, taking up space. Ronda already had the replacement door; it had been donated to her son for a haunted house project and had bloody-looking handprints all over it. She cleaned it up, painted it to look old and distressed, added an antique knob and hung it on barn hardware she picked up at The Home Depot.To see DIY tutorials for features in this laundry room, check out Ronda’s blog,Batchelors Way.
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