Our DIY Laundry Room Shelving

Our laundry room hosted nothing but the washer and dryer. It wasn’t functional. We had a pantry across the laundry room that was loaded from the floor to the ceiling with stuff. We could barely get the door open to get in and out of the pantry. The pantry hosted everything from cleaning materials, extra pots/pans/blenders/plastic ware-your name tn. I absolutely loathed that it was unorganized and not functional. We had to do something about it.

Here is what our laundry room looked like before. Simple. Clean. Plain. Boring.

We needed to lighten the load in our laundry room pantry to make room for cleaning supplies, extra dishes and our coats. We were also tired of using our kitchen table and the top of our washer/dryer as a central hub for my purse, two diaper bags, my work bag, Jeremiah’s work bag, hats, etc. We couldn’t eat at our kitchen table because it hosted these items.

We headed to Lowe’s and picked up 3 planks of wood in the size of 1″ x 12″ x 6′. I did not want manufactured wood, because I do not like the texture. We needed the length of our shelves to be 5 1/2′ which Lowes ended cutting the wood down to the dimensions we needed. We took one of the planks and split it in half to make a 1″ x 6″ x 5 1/2′ to get a total depth of 18″ for our shelves.

We purchased Killz Original Primer to prime the shelves. We had originally decided to prime the wood so we can paint it to match the interior trim. We decided to prime it and paint it first before we put the shelves together. It’s more difficult to hang up side down and twist your body in all different angles just to paint a shelf after you already hung it.

After priming we saw that the prime was a close enough match to the interior trim. The primer we picked is used to protect the wood from spills and stains. Since we planned on putting our laundry soap, detergent and other liquid items on the shelves, we thought it was a good investment at the time. However, the primer was like paste and had drops of goo inside the texture even after we stirred it up. I don’t think we will be using that specific type of primer again.

We had purchased four brackets from Lowes to help hold the weight of the shelves. Jeremiah’s brother is turning his attic into a two-story house and had some 2″ x 2″ that we used at the end of the shelves. We needed a more stable method to hold the two shelves together to prevent our shelves from flipping over on me while I’m doing laundry. The brackets had only two sets of holes to screw into the wood (two in the top back and one in the top front). We needed four sets to stabilize the shelves and prevent them from flipping over since we were using two pieces of wood (a 12″ and 6″ depth) to equal the 18″ depth that we wanted.

I’m hoping you won’t notice our alignment error. I’m blaming the husband for that.

You can see how we installed the 1″ x 6″ x 5 1/2′ in the back first.

Then we added the 1″ x 12 ” x 5 1/2′. Only the front part of the center brackets were holding the front piece of wood. We screwed each section of the wood into the side brackets to prevent it from flipping over on me while in use.

Here’s the almost-finished product. Aww, isn’t it pretty? We are loving the extra storage space.

Here’s a side-by-side comparison of our almost-finished laundry room shelves.

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The beard board, the hooks, the blue door is beautiful. Who would have thought to paint an interior door blue? I love it!

Here’s the break-down of the costs we spent to build our laundry room shelves.

Total Laundry Room Shelves DIY cost: $62.20

So what do you think? Do you like it? Do you have shelves in your laundry room? Show me.

Pst – Check out how we made our laundry room functional and turned it into a family command center by reading about it here.