The Laundry Room Coat Cupboard part I

Gracious it's two weeks since I posted.. I'll do better I promise... but posting takes me ages since I'm a crap typist, and of course you have to do the actual work so that you've got something to post about..

This is a job that Bill [my DIY challenged hubby for those who don't know him] and I did together last weekend. And WITHOUT a row, which was a right result. ;o)

The Laundry room was one of the first rooms I finished making over after we moved in.. [I'll show you that next week], but we've been struggling with storage in there for a while now.. [Bill's shoes mostly] and the configuration of the cupboard was fairly useless so I decided to rework it.


very dull photo of the doors.

 In most of the rest of the house I've had the bi-folds taken off and regular swing doors put on.. but here they would have been impractical, because on the right is the door into the garage, and on the left the door to the hallway.

cluttered & disorganised

I have several issues with the layout of this cupboard:
The shelf is too low, so there's lots of dead space above it that's wasted, which could be much more efficent.

Lots of dead space

Don't ask about the hat !!

The rod is unnecessarily low so long coats [at best] brush over dirty boots & shoes or [at worst] drag on the floor. The floor space has no organisation so its a mess that catches everytime you try to close the doors plus the corners tend to get cluttered.

scruffy eh !!

We had a chat about the best way to deal with the problems.. and raising the bar [excuse the pun] and the rail were a no brainer. We then took a little trip to Home Depot, and found these IKEA knock off cubbies for $25 each, to create some more organisation.



So a rip off of IKEA.



So while Bill's busy putting the cubbies [3 sets of 2] together, I cleared out the cupboard..

Look at that bloody pink baseboard [skirting board for the Brits]

When I first looked at our house the previous owners told me that when they first moved in EVERY single piece of wood in the house was this colour..

EVERY door, architrave, trim, skirting board, window frame.. even the ceiling fan in the hall was ROSE PINK.

Fortunately for us.. they had already painted most of it out with whites and creams.. but even now I'm still finding it in odd places.. Here's another bit about to bite the dust.

And I painted.. It's a Debbie Travis colour called Coastal Walk [mushroom] that I used in the en-suite and on one wall in the laundry too.

Initially we thought we might put the cubbies horizontally right across the whole width of the cupboard.. but that makes storage of odd shaped things on the floor problematic..

I think you can tell what we decided from the shape of the paint. 

The height of the cubbies as they related to the ideal shelf height dictated the shape really. We wanted the shelf to be roughly 72 [70-74] inches high, which is approx 5 cubes, but the cubbies only came in twos so to get 5 high one pair had to go on its side.. but we liked the way it looked and actually it works really well.

The four cubes in the tower are attatched to each other at the front and the back for security..

I know its unattractive but I'm going to trim them so this won't show... and we also secured it to the wall with a screw or two through the back.

As you can see they don't look as pretty as they do on the box.. so there was some finishing to do, although to be fair the holes are there for the adjustable shelves or drawers that you can buy. This range also has  bright canvas totes that fit snuggly into the cubes.. but I don't think I'm going to bother with them.

So that was Sunday.. Monday we finished it off, but I haven't downloaded the photo's yet so that's tomorrow's job..

Jo xx