This is a quick little fix for our laundry room (cupboard) that is one of those things that just niggled at me. For some reason, random items of clothing get left all over the main floor of our house. I am often yelling at gently reminding someone to go and deposit said items in our laundry. I keep a laundry hamper there so the items aren't on the floor again in case there is laundry in the machine already (which there often is of course). The laundry hamper I had there was a large'ish square fabric one that just fit in the space in front of our little tub but I often had to drag it out to reach the tub or something on the shelves and so on. Anyway, of course it wasn't a big deal but it often got left out in the hallway and it was fabric (not great for keeping clean) and a bit cumbersome blah blah blah and I have been focussing on attending to all these little annoyances lately. In the hope that my life will start running as smoothly as I imagine everyone else's does. Ha!
So, I picked up a smaller hamper from The Container Store (it was about $20 from memory) and thought I would attach some castors to it. I love castors. They are great on all sorts of furniture too in my opinion. Obviously I couldn't attach the castors to the plastic on its own so I cut out a rectangle from some scrap wood to match the base of the hamper. Well, I started to cut it out and the commercial size jigsaw I borrowed from my contractor neighbour went all crazy and wouldn't shut off and I had a little moment of panic in the garage trying to turn the thing off. My neighbour then finished cutting it out for me. He is good like that. :)
Wood, meet hamper....
I was thinking about leaving the wood natural but decided my less than glamorous laundry cupboard (not to sound ungrateful - I am very glad we even have a laundry with a little tub) could do with a little hit of colour. So I primed the edges that would be seen. I didn't do the whole top and bottom because, well why bother?
Then two coats of a pretty blue. I then attached this to the bottom of the hamper with poster putty so I could drill some pilot holes for the screws that were attaching it from inside the hamper bottom. Keep reading, that will make sense soon.
I found these washers that are a decent size but with a smaller central hole (got them at Home Depot) as I thought they would hold the plastic down better than just the screws.
As you can see, little measuring was done to make these even. I just eyeballed it. It was a little tricky drilling down into the hamper when I realised the screws I was using wouldn't stick to my magnetic drill bit. So I busted out an old trick.
Yep, poster putty. Worked like a charm.
I bought four of these small castors to attach to the bottom. I got these at Ace Hardware (obviously). My only requirements were that they needed to be small enough to not stick out from under the hamper and they had to swivel, for obvious reasons.
I marked out my spots, drilled more pilot holes and then screwed them on. Oh, I took out the poster putty from between the wood and the hamper before I attached the wood too.
Here she is, a little fun touch and mobile now!
Here it is tucked into our laundry closet (like I said, there are no glamour shots in this post). It fits perfectly and is easy to just scoot out of the way when I need to get to the tub.
Just a little thing but it helps to make my day run that just a teeny little bit smoother so that suits me just fine. Anybody else been trying to remove little annoyances from their day too?
