Urban Mom’s Hanging Laundry Nook

My now three-year old daughter Ada used to love going through her laundry hamper and try on her clothing. You’d change her and find five socks on her feet and normally multiple pants. It was adorable. But as we took the safety locks off of clothing drawers and had our second daughter her dirty laundry started getting mixed into her clean clothing which meant way more work for me. We live in a two bedroom apartment and wanted to find a solution that wouldn’t take up extra space. After looking around, I came across Urban Mom’s Hanging Laundry Nook on Amazon. It looked like it may solve our problems, had good reviews, and wasn’t too pricey so I figured I would try it… and I’m so glad I did. I loved it so much that I ended up buying a second one eight days later to replace the bulkier hamper in our bedroom.

Pros

Here is why I love it:

• It’s easy to put on the door, it’s secure, doesn’t fall off, and doesn’t slide around. On one of the doors it sometimes knocked against the top of our door sill but on the advice of a previous reviewer I bent the metal hooks slightly and the problem went away.
• The hole at the top is large enough and angled enough that its super simple to add clothing to it. Even when you filled it to max and you’re putting off laundry just a bit longer you always seem to be able to jam a couple extra pants, etc and have them hang out the opening.
• The bottom has a zipper so whenever I’m about to do laundry I place a plastic laundry basket underneath, unzip the zipper, and it all falls into the basket. Incredibly simple. The only complaint is if you’re super tired and forget to zip it back up you may wonder why the first item of clothing you put back in falls out and stare at it tiredly for a second… but that’s user error and just shows that you need a break.
• It’s really easy to wash the nook when needed. To do so I empty it out first, zip it back up, take it off the hooks, and throw it into the laundry with the rest of my load. No extra work.
• I’ve had both of them for over a year, plus a couple of months, and they’ve both been used all the time and thrown into the laundry a lot and I haven’t noticed any fading.
• Both the ones I bought were coffee-colored and I believe there were only two color choices when I ordered. Going onto the link now I noticed five different colors you can choose from: grey, coffee, pink. green, and blue. If they ever add eggplant I may have to come up with some reason why a two bedroom apartment could use, and have space for, three laundry nooks.

Cons

The only major con I’ve noticed is if your wall is perpendicular to your door and the door opens towards the wall then when the nook gets really full your door doesn’t open all the way. If you want to get around this, and put off laundry for a bit longer, you could always move the hooks further down the top of the door. This happens with both of our doors; but doesn’t diminish my love for them. Additionally, Ada and Zoey can’t access the laundry nook, They also can’t throw laundry in the nook but for Zoey that might be a good thing. Ada has learned to put her dirty clothing on our changing table for me to move later.

Add-on hack

If you need to keep some of your laundry separate, for example delicates, you can easily recreate my hack. It’s not pretty but it’s hidden in our bedroom. I bought some mesh laundry bags off of Amazon and added a ribbon on the top to hang it off of the metal hook I already have for the laundry hook. I actually created two; one for my delicates and the other for my used dishrags. I hardly ever have to move the bags out-of-the-way as our laundry nook hardly ever needs to be washed and it’s all in one location. And when the mesh bags get overused I just need to attach a ribbon onto another bag and hang the replacement up.

To create your own I took a fabric ribbon, since it’s going to go in the laundry, cut it to size depending on how large you want your loop, overlap the ends, and hand sew it on. Then you just need to hang it up. I leave it unzipped for easy access and then when I’m going to launder it I just pull it off, zip it up, and throw it in the laundry with the rest.

You can connect with me through the comments below, on my Facebook page, or through Instagram. I’d love to hear if this hack helped you out.