The Laundry Cupboard: What Lurks in the Dark?

Another wet weekend, another messy cupboard. Do you have a cupboard which is full of all the bits and pieces and detritus of living, which just gets shoved there when there is no other obvious place to store it? This is my laundry cupboard, and it haunts me. I suspect, when I have one of those bad dreams where I wake up full of dread but can't remember what I dreamt, that it was about this cupboard..

Again, a corner cupboard that has dark, dark depths. I have no idea what is back there.

Oh, yes, there it all is. Oh, and some more..

I confess, at this point I went and had a cup of tea. And some cake. OK, let's crack on. Clean out that cupboard. Dirt, dust, and something that had leaked copiously.

The trick with putting things back in a dire, overstuffed storage space, is to only put half back. Everything else must go. And everything that stays must be stored like with like and must have a function that is pertinent to laundriness. So, what do I want in the laundry? Cleaning. I also store a bunch of garden items here. Cat food and kitty litter.

All right, cleaning. Those untidy piles of rags. I don't have disposable cleaning cloths, so I have a lot of washable rags. The only really useful ones are old flannels, towels, nappies and tea towels. All those annoying T-shirts and cut up bits of pyjamas I send out to the shed for painting rags.

What I have left is one crate of small rags (cleaning)..

and underneath, two piles of large rags (drying and mopping up) and two old towels (floods).

Now for cleaning. I had more cleaning gear in the top of the broom cupboard. Not everyday cleaning gear, that is in yet another laundry cupboard, but all the alchemical potions I have gathered for making cleaning products, and things like the shoe polishing kit, the leather cleaning kit and other cleaning bits and bobs. I have decided to consolidate shoe polishing and leather cleaning in the broom cupboard, potion making kit in the laundry cupboard. And in the process I discovered I had packets of all sorts of ingredients  which I decanted into coffee jars and labelled just like an organised person.

I have bleach ( I know it's nasty, but diluted 1:10 with water it is brilliant for cleaning mould off outdoor furniture and umbrellas), vinegar, methylated spirits, washing soda, ground soap, bicarb soda, borax and cloudy ammonia. I think with that arsenal I will be able to whip up a cleaning solution for just about anything. And some of those ingredients were a real surprise. It's amazing what appears from the back of a dark cupboard.

At the back is my collection of empty bottles. I have been saving them to create cleaning solutions. Stay tuned.

And a lovely rustic storage solution for the seeds. They were quite pleased to get out of that common old icecream container. I have decided to store the rest of the gardening bits and bobs on my gardening bench in the porch downstairs, but seeds need to be cool, dark and dry.

Space left over! The very last of the bulk dishwasher powder. It will be used up soon, and there will be more space. I moved the kitty litter out of the cupboard next door ready for another project I have in mind. I will need to move my other cleaning bucket in here. Posy took it out to the cubby house in autumn and it is, erm, still there.

So here we are. I can see everything. As my mother-in-law used to say, a place for everything, and everything in its place.

Oh, and then there was everything else still left on the bench. Bin, recycling, op shop, shed. And now, there is room for the lemon grass plant to sit on the laundry bench. I had been attempting to overwinter it inside, but on the back porch floor where I never remember to water it and it gets no sun. Maybe here it will survive until spring.

The cats now eat on the bench. Their food and water used to be on the floor, but we kept stepping in it and dropping the clean washing in it. Here they eat their dinner then pose artistically while gazing pensively out of the window. It is important to incorporate cats into the interior decoration.

And the rest of the laundry, clean and happy. It's dark now, and The Girl is making dinner, bless her.

Broccoli cannelloni and dark chocolate sponge pudding.

House rule: if you make dinner you don't have to do the dishes.