We live in a bungalow house with the washer and dryer in the basement, which is a very common arrangement here. We are toying with the idea of giving up a chunk of our dining room for an area that would house the washer, dryer, a small freezer, and possibly some pantry shelves.
To try to paint the picture, our kitchen/living room/dining room are basically a large rectangle, with the kitchen kind of a cube that takes up one quarter of the rectangle, and the dining room another quarter beside it. The chunk we’re thinking of taking would be a four foot wide space across the end of the dining room.
Which would be your preference if you were looking to buy a house - washer and dryer left in the basement in a separate utility room, or a smaller dining room with the washer/dryer/freezer on the main floor?
Main floor, especially if that’s where the bedrooms are.
But one advantage of laundry in the basement is you don’t have to keep the area tidy.
Our utility room is between the kitchen and the back door. For some reason, when people come over, they use the back door. It’s an incentive for me to keep it neat, but it’s a pain.
I vote for main floor laundry. I’ve rented from places with both types of arrangements, and when the washer & dryer are on the main floor, it’s sooo much better. It makes me WANT to do laundry. IMO, it’s a better selling point, it’s more convenient, and it’s more handicap-accessible. If you (or your future potential buyer) plan to live there in your old age, it would be really nice to not have to trudge up and down that flight for every load. And there are no (or at least, fewer) insects/spiders on the main floor than the average basement. And when you do laundry, the whole house smells good. It’s also easier to tell when a load is done–I can never hear the buzzer in the basement from upstairs. And instead of leaving a massive pile of laundry for the weekend, you might find yourself more inclined to do a load every/every other evening, making it seem like a less-onerous task. Because why not, it’s right there!
As trade offs, there’s a greater risk of leaks ruining the floor, and spills are more of a pain because they’re in a more visible/high-traffic area.
I can’t imagine anyone who wouldn’t prefer main-floor laundry, although it would be a good idea to put a closet/door around it. I wouldn’t be as big a fan if the washer/dryer were visibly sitting in a corner of the dining room area.
Depends how small the resulting dining room would be - if it’s still large enough for a table for 8 (10-12 assuming it can stretch into the living room on special occasions) and a buffet/hutch combination then I say add the pantry/laundry/etc.
However, if the resulting dining room is going to be tiny and unusable, that would be a turn off as a buyer to me, personally. We like to entertain by having dinner parties and our current dining room is a bit small (although can be stretched as described above) - when we buy a new house (in the next two years I think) I will be wanting a larger dining room space. (FWIW, I think the room at the moment is about 10x10.)
Freezer is a non-issue to me. I have no problem having to go to the basement to fetch something out of the 2nd freezer/fridge.
Are you planning to box it in? Generally speaking, people like open floor concepts, so I wouldn’t do anything that would make the dining room feel more confined, especially if the back wall has windows that let natural light in.
It concerns me that the dining room is just 1/4 of the space already? You mustn’t render the room unusable, so it would mainly depend on the dimensions of the room afterward. If it’s an historic home, I would be very reticent to destroy any woodwork/built-in shelves.
The drawbacks of leaving the laundry machines in the basement:
Gotta haul it up and down a flight of stairs. (This isn’t a big factor to me, but I can see why it would be to others.)
The drawbacks of having the laundry machines in the dining room:
Makes the dining room smaller. Doesn’t matter if it’s huge now, but like alice, I’d want enough room to seat 8 people comfortably, and 10-12 in a pinch, and if moving the laundry machines upstairs made that impossible, I’d want them to stay in the basement.
Laundry waiting to go into the machines will almost inevitably sit in baskets or piles in the living room.
Running the laundry machines during meal times would mean having to talk over the machine noise. Not fun.
How much of a problem (2) and (3) are depends on how much laundry one generates. We typically change our towels once a week; there are people who use a fresh towel every time they shower. Some people have children (and children generate considerable extra laundry, even when they’re small); some don’t.
I personally would want the washer and dryer away from the living/dining/kitchen area. In a main floor bathroom, if there’s room, is good, or in a nook off the master bedroom if that works, e.g. if you’ve got a walk-in closet that you don’t really need. But if the choice is between LR/DR/kitchen and the basement, I’m going with the basement.
How often do you use the dining room? Now, how often do you do laundry?
If the dining room is the type used only 2-3 holidays per year, defintiely sub-divide it for day-to-day convenience.
Also, think about your long-term plans. If your plan is stay and grow old here, the time may come when you can no longer carry laundry up and down the stairs.
I would consider getting an inspector in to check if this was possible:
Remove the wall between the kitchen and dining area. Create a small utility space that would hold laundry and pantry. Make the combined area an eat in kitchen.
I hate formal dining, I prefer to get everybody involved in the cooking and socializing. Not that I am incapable of organizing a formal party, I just tend to prefer to hang out and socialize as part of the evening. I designed a 4 bedroom house that had a 30x30 eat in kitchen and a 10x15 living room. Our living pattern is for the household itself to sit and watch TV and play whatever on laptops together, and our entertaining is all done cooking and eating together rather than some people sitting and watching TV while a couple cook then hauling everything into a separate dining room and then sitting at table. We like interactive stuff like fondue/shabu-shabu cook it yourself, make your own <shish kebab/taco/burger stack/whatever> bars, crab boils. Anything where we can all hang out cooking and eating. Last November we had a cookie making and decorating party. I introduced several people to springerle cookies =) and people love playing with cookie cutters and gingerbread and short bread molds.
I’m going to guess that in a bungalow, the kitchen isn’t an eat-in and the dining room is the only place for a table and chairs. In that case, I feel awfully leery about making the dining room smaller since bungalows don’t tend to have big rooms to start with.
If major renovation is an option, I like the idea above of having stackable laundry in a small closet that pairs up with the pantry.
The dining room is used all the time - the cats have their bowls in there.
We’re not dining room people, either, but I can see the point that future possible buyers of the house might be. The noise is an issue, too - my washer and dryer aren’t particularly loud, but having them 20 feet from the tv might not be the best location. I think I’ll look around the main floor for another location that might work better - maybe sacrificing a closet or part of a bedroom.
I prefer the laundry away from everything else due to mess and pile up of awaiting laundry.
However, I think my opinion is in the minority. I’ve heard a lot of people say that a key consideration for them when buying a house is a laundry room on the floor where the bedrooms are.
Something we did that might help if you put your laundry in the dining room is we bought front loaders and put them inside cabinets (with vents). We put a granite countertop on top. The result is our washer and dryer are hidden from view when we aren’t using them and we have a huge countertop in our dining room* for wine and drinks when entertaining in our dining room.
I love it. One warning, the counter top is HUGE, very deep to accommodate the machines.
*We didn’t make our dining room small by moving the laundry into the dining room. The laundry was already in a closet adjacent to the dining room. We removed the closet doors and turned it into a laundry nook with the laundry machines below and counter on top.
The questions should be: how old are you now and how long do you intend to live there? At some point in your life, stairs become a bitch. We bought this place, built out onto an unused back porch area and moved the laundry up to the main level. At age 65, and with iffy balance, my wife doesn’t need to be climbing stairs all the time and neither do I.
We had our laundry on the main floor and we moved it to the basement. The area it was in wasn’t big enough to spread out all the accoutrements that go with laundry- drying rack, ironing board, slop sink, shelves for detergent, etc. It only held the washer and dryer, and maneuvering in there sucked. Plus, it was noisy. We had a huge, empty, unfinished basement, so it was a no-brainer. Now we have a big space for all manner of laundry amenities, and it’s nice and quiet on the main floor.
For me, when I do a renovation, I try not to think about ‘resale value.’ I have no plans to move so I make things comfortable for me.
For me, unless I also had an eat in kitchen, I would not make the dining room smaller. We often have many people over to eat or play games and it would make that difficult.
If I didn’t often have people over who needed to sit at a table, I would totally go for ground floor laundry. Currently our washer and dryer are in the basement and our bedrooms (where it goes away) are on the second floor. It’s a big pain in the butt.
PLUS–if you intend on “going green,” and hanging clothes outside to dry, it’s a HELLUVA lot easier carrying wet clothes from the main floor than horsing them up the basement stairs.
I’m a big fan of line-dried clothes. Sheets feel like they are ironed, and outer clothes can be hung using plastic hangers. They look beautiful. Crunchy towels are no biggie to me.
~VOW
