A laundry room fails for one of two reasons: there's nowhere to put things down, or the space fights the order you actually do things in. Both are layout problems, and neither requires more square footage to fix.

Lay it out in the order you work#

Laundry is a sequence: sort, wash, dry, fold, put away. A room that supports that sequence feels twice its size.

Working left to right (or right to left, consistently): hampers → washer → dryer → folding surface → hanging space. The moment you have to carry a basket back past something you already did, you've added a step you'll repeat several hundred times a year.

If your washer and dryer are side by side, the folding surface goes at the end of the run, not across the room.

The folding surface is non-negotiable#

This is the piece most laundry rooms lack, and its absence is why clean clothes end up living in baskets.

For side-by-side machines, a countertop across the top is the ideal answer. For stacked or front-loaders, a wall-mounted drop-leaf table folds flat when you're not using it and costs very little. Even a sturdy board cut to sit across the top of a front-loading pair works.

You need roughly the footprint of one opened bath towel. That's it.

Sort before the room, not in it#

The most valuable organizing decision happens elsewhere in the house. A three-section hamper in the bedroom — lights, darks, towels — means clothes arrive pre-sorted and the laundry room floor never becomes a staging area.

This single change removes the step that generates all the visual chaos. More on the family version in our time-saving guide.

Go vertical#

Floor space is fixed; wall space usually isn't.

• Shelving above the machines for detergent and supplies. Keep them in a lift-out caddy so you're not reaching over a running machine.
• A tension rod or wall-mounted bar for anything that comes out of the dryer on a hanger. Hanging immediately means not ironing later.
• A retractable clothesline across the room for line-dry items — it disappears when not in use.
• Over-the-door racks on the inside of the laundry room door for flat items.
• A wall-mounted drying rack that folds against the wall.

Small containers, labeled#

Decant detergent into a container you can actually pour from, keep a small jar for the coins and pocket contents that would otherwise scatter, and add a lidded bin for single socks. The sock bin is only half a joke — a designated home for orphans stops them accumulating on every flat surface.

Keep a small trash can for lint and dryer sheets. Emptying the lint trap every load matters for both dry time and fire safety, and people skip it when the bin is in another room.

When the laundry room is a closet#

Stacked machines, a fold-down shelf, an over-door rack, and a hanging rod on a tension bar. Slim rolling carts fit in the gap beside a machine and pull out when you need them. A curtain instead of a door frees the swing space.

Accept that a closet laundry cannot handle bulky items. A king comforter will not fit, and forcing it produces a badly washed comforter and a strained machine.

When there's no room at all#

Plenty of Des Moines apartments and older homes have no viable laundry space, and no amount of organizing fixes that. It's a reasonable reason to do laundry elsewhere — and worth noting that even people with in-unit machines bring bedding and comforters out, because home drums simply aren't big enough for them.

Our stores run large-capacity machines with folding counters built in, so the sort-wash-dry-fold sequence happens in one place, in one trip. Our comforter and bulky bedding guide covers what home machines can and can't handle.

Find your nearest store and its hours on the locations page.