Custom Laundry room

The laundry room can be one of the most utilitarian spaces in a family home when it has been a well planned and designed space.

When building a custom home, taking the time to accommodate all the functions and tasks that will be taking place inside this room will result in making live a lot easier for years to come, besides adding to the house the kind of custom design that must people would love to have. 

These are the details that make a house superior to similar properties and mark a price difference between houses in nearby locations.

I will outline few features that make a laundry room a very functional space and therefore should be taking in consideration at the time of building or renovating a home.

1- Laundry chute : a laundry chute is a channel built from an upstairs location to the downstairs laundry. Often the chute will start near an upstairs bathroom inside a closet or cabinet and finish in the laundry room downstairs often also inside a cabinet, where a laundry basket will receive the laundry.

2- Swinging door : a swing door is a door that opens both ways. Its a practical room to install in a laundry room because it makes possible to pass through it without using our hands to open it. It is That is very common for someone enter or exit the room carrying baskets full of clothes.

3- Motion sensor lights. Lights turn on and off by it self when someone walks into the room or open the door.

4- Built-ins laundry bins : built-ins dirty laundry baskets, located under the working counter or inside a custom cabinet, usually three bins, to be able to sort out dirty laundry before washing.

5- Fold out or slide out ironing board : the iron board is hidden inside a cabinet and folds and slides out when need it.

6- Working counter with under-cabinet balance lights : One or two working counter will be very useful space to classify dirty clothes and fold the clean clothes.

7- Cabinets and plenty of storage spaces and drawers are never enough in a laundry room. Hanging rods and drying racks.

8- A counter sink is always useful to have in the laundry room.

9- An important detail to consider when building a laundry room is to look into the possibility of sound proofing all the walls and ceiling of the room. That way the noise of the washing and drying machines will not be hear in other rooms of the house and will allow for a comfortable use of the room at all times of the day or night without inconveniencing people in other rooms of the house.

10- At the time of construction it would be also a good idea to install blocking in the areas of the wall where it could be need it in the future to install hardware and others utensils on the walls. When building a laundry room I board the walls up with 9/16 OSB sheets first, that way there will be blocking all around the room for installations in the future.

11- Installing a floor drain in the laundry room is a building code requirement in most districts, just make sure it is place in the proper location and the floor slopes to it.