5 Laundry Room Design Mistakes Interior Designers Always Notice

Given their small size and the fact that they need to be highly functional, laundry rooms are often ground zero for decorating mistakes. They also tend to be closed off from the rest of the home, meaning it's easy to shut the door and forget about how glum yours truly makes you feel.

We asked pros to unload the laundry room decorating mistakes they most often see clients making. From basic blunders to more niche missteps, here are five things that result in lackluster laundry rooms, plus, tips on how to create laundry rooms that feel fresh, fabulous, and fun instead.

Meet the Experts

• Rashmi Patel is a designer at the firm Rush Me Home.

• N’Ckyola "Nikki" Green is a designer at Xtraordinary by Design.

• Ellie Mroz is a designer at Ellie Mroz Design.

Not Investing in the Laundry Room

Just because the laundry room isn’t a space that’s on display for guests like a living room or a powder room doesn’t mean you should neglect it, Rashmi Patel, a designer at the firm, Rush Me Home, says.

Not only will decorating your laundry room create cohesion in your house as a whole, Patel says, but it will also transform it into a destination you don’t mind spending time in.

"Laundry is a chore and you’re in the laundry room a lot, so you might as well make it look nice," she says.

According to Patel, decorating a laundry room doesn't need to be costly or labor-intensive, either. Patel loves affordable fixes such as adding a pop of color with paint on the walls or using wicker or wire baskets to bring visual cohesion to open shelving.

For a bigger investment, Patel recommends updating the floor tiles with a fun pattern if the budget permits. Painted concrete tiles are a great choice here, as they're durable and easy to source in bright, cheery color schemes.

Not Storing Items Where They Belong

"Your laundry room is not a catch-all for things that haven't found a home," N’Ckyola "Nikki" Green, a designer at Xtraordinary by Design, says.

In a deep dive into her own home's laundry room, Green discovered that it was serving as a holdover space for items that had no business in a laundry room or even inside the home at all. She mentions items like paint, garden fertilizer, or cleaning chemicals.

Limit your laundry room's contents to only the essentials and everything will be tidier-looking and easier to access, reducing stress and making laundry feel like less of a slog.

Not Making Space-Saving Decisions

Laundry rooms are rarely spacious. With that in mind, you'll want to incorporate space-saving techniques to make yours as functional as possible, Ellie Mroz, a designer at Ellie Mroz Design, says.

"Fold-down surfaces for drying, ironing, and folding are key in small spaces," Mroz says.

She suggests taking inventory of your laundry cleaning process so you have key insights into what sorts of work surfaces or storage options are critical.

To create folding space—a near necessity for almost everyone—Mroz recommends building a countertop above the front loading machines or stacking your machines and adding a compact countertop next to them.

Hanging rods, she notes, are also a great way to make use of underutilized space above a side-by-side washer and dryer. Use them to air dry leggings or other delicates that need to skip the dryer.

Not Having Effective Cabinetry

Green suggests assessing your laundry room's current cabinetry layout to make a call on whether or not it's truly conducive to how you do laundry. If it's not, give the offending cabinets the boot.

"In our own laundry room, we removed a wall cabinet put in by the builder," Green says, noting that taking it out opened up the space dramatically.

"We replaced it with a small shelf for our most-used items, pairing it with a standard overhead shelf with bins for extra supplies," Green says.

Mroz seconds this idea, encouraging people to consider swapping closed cabinetry for open cabinetry. According to Mroz, it can be the perfect place to store bulky items like laundry baskets.

Her one golden rule? Make sure to measure your laundry baskets before you build.

Not Incorporating Color

"If a client tells us they spend a lot of their day doing laundry, we urge them to consider wallpaper in the space," Mroz says.

Mroz notes that because laundry rooms are generally small, walled-off spaces that don't open up to the rest of the home, they're a great spot to experiment with a print or color that may feel out of place elsewhere in your abode.

If wallpaper feels a little too out of your comfort zone, try opting for paint in an unexpected hue, or colored cabinets. Even a simple hutch or cabinet, painted in a colorful hue can make a huge impact on your space's overall energy.

Read Next: 20 Laundry Room Organization Ideas to Declutter Your Space

Read the original article on The Spruce.