Yes, flat is good for them, but those drawers aren’t big enough to handle a full adult sweater!
You can use more than one rod/line on the multiple drying racks for the things that need to lie flat. The fact that some bit might drape over isn’t a problem if you’re not constrained by a drawer apparatus.
I’m a huge fan of making repetitive chores as easy as possible. This laundry room looks better than it functions, to my mind. It’s pretty, sure, but I don’t see how it makes things EASIER for the person doing laundry (other than the sorting bins, but there are a lot of ways to do that).
If you watched the video and went to the site, they do mention that a lot of the materials were bought cheap or repurposed from other things. The before picture clearly shows the machines already there, the cabinet was taken from a daughter’s room, the door was from a son’s haunted house project. And they show her cutting wood, so she did it mostly herself.
I also wonder how they managed to do that entire redecorating with only $400. Even if you don't value the hours spent doing much of the work yourself, there's still a lot of raw material cost and did they really already own all of the power tools needed to put it together?
@bcsizemo already responded to say that it looks like only a mitre saw was necessary, from a power tools perspective. That’s a major cost I was wondering about, explained away. But $400 is not a lot of money for the amount of redo that they did, so I have to assume there was an astonishing amount of TIME as the main cost (to find things for free/cheap, and to do all the work manually without professional help). Looking at the home in general and the quality of their fixtures, this is not a family that NEEDS to wait so as to be able to find free materials to use. Time spent turning the laundry room into a magazine-ready spread could have done laundry for years. And the end result, as I’ve mentioned above, isn’t actually very space- and use-effective.
I think I’m sensitive to this because I have very close friends who both have 50-60+ hour jobs (the husband actually has 3 jobs) and a 45 minute commute to work, and they’re trying to save money by doing their renovations in their “spare time”. It’s been years that the family has been living in chaos now. There comes a time when paying a professional to do the work in a day or two makes more sense than having exposed walls and pipes for months (if not years). Plus, you get expert advice on what NOT to do, either from a cost or functional point of view.
It’s from Ikea and is called Mulig. It’s cheap and pretty strong and has a small footprint and more hanging space than most. You can adjust it to hang lots of small items or fewer large items by choosing how many of the racks to fold out, and you can place a sweater on a double rack if it needs to dry flat. It’s stable if you collapse one side and it folds completely flat if you need the space.
Huh, I was always assuming those neat IKEA items other people had that I couldn’t find were just discontinued. I should have known they sold differently in America. Guess I’ll have to head down to the actual store and have a look around instead. Thanks!
Here is the place to tell my favorite laundry story.
In college I had a friend who hailed from Boca Raton, the ultra wealthy place in Florida. He owned many beautiful clothes, which he piled up in a wad on the floor of his closet until it became a small mountain. It was a crime to see his silk blazers crumpled up. He would occasionally take a t-shirt off the pile, spray it with deodorant, call it good, and wear it.
One day I’m walking with him and he says, “I did my laundry.”
Just a note on this. I have been redoing my kitchen for three years now, and it’s not a major remodel either. I kept the cabinets but painted them. I’ve scrounged stuff on craigslist. I have done a lot it for a lot less than most remodels and made my kitchen really functional.
However, I have a beef about how these costs are calculated on DIY projects. I see it in a lot of articles. They cost the paint, the cabinets they got on craigslist or through the ReStore. They cost the hardware for the pulls. But not the tools, not the screws, not the glue, not the tape, not the sandpaper, not the paint rollers nor the disposable paint supplies, not the thing you bought that didn’t work and so you ripped it out. It adds up.
On the plus side of DIY, doing it slowly I’ve been able to let the project evolve in way I wouldn’t have planned, based on actually using it. I haven’t had to move out of my kitchen while the work is getting done, which I couldn’t do. On the negative side - three years and a lot of investment in tools.
