I know that not everyone has eight kids like I have and that laundry isn't quite as big of an issue for most people. However, it is not an afterthought for us. It doesn't matter if you're a single person or if you are like my friends who have adopted nineteen kids. Laundry has to be thought about every single day.
Will someone please tell me why the average American home has a laundry room that is an afterthought by the designer of the home? I've never gathered the statistics, but I have seen plenty of homes in my five years as a REALTOR® in the Fort Worth area and what I have seen is an overwhelming number of laundry rooms that are as far from where people change their clothes as possible. The largest majority of them are pass thrus between the garage and the house.
Do we really want our clothes piliing up by our back door? Have you ever walked in the door of your garage. For a family my size, we need sorting bins for our clothes. But there isn't any room for them in the typical laundry room.
It's kind of funny, but that's almost the first thing I look for in a home. Where is the laundry room placed? I've actually been known while videoing a home for one of my video tours to get super excited about a larger than average laundry room placed near the bedrooms.
If the room has a sink, that's a huge plus that should be a requirement. We need sinks where we do our clothes. Another thing we need is a place to fold the clothes.
My dream home actually consists of small closets in bedrooms, but a dressing room attached to a bathroom. This way, you could put the washer and dryer in the dressing room as well as dressers. All the clothes would go in the dressing room.
Just think of the time savings. You could wash and dry the clothes. Immediately after taking the clothes out of the dryer, you simply fold them and put them away, in the same room! In the morning, you entered the dressing room, get dressed and put your dirty clothes in the bin. So easy!
When I was a kid growing up in Iowa, we had our laundry area in the basement of our house. Since we lived in a two story house, all the clothes had to go from the second story down to the basement.
We were the kind of family that did all of our clothes every couple of weeks. We had piles and piles of clothes. We would actually ride down the stairs on the mountain of clothes. It was so much fun when I was ten, but now that I'm the mom, I don't want my kids rolling down the stairs on the laundry.
The first two houses I owned as a grownup in California had the laundry area in the garage. That was okay, except that I had to go out of the house and then into the garage. I had a toddler and a baby when I lived in that house. I could often be found with the baby on top of the pile of clothes being carried in the basket. The washer and dryer also doubled as a work bench area for my husband. The only time that was a problem was when he set a car battery on the dryer which managed to leak battery acid into the dryer through the lint filter. I knew there was a problem when I went to pull the lint filter out, but only the handle came out. Do you think it was my husband's clothes that were in the dryer at the time? No. And that's all I'n going to say about that.
The next house I owned was a large six bedroom house with a pass thru laundry. It was even worse than a regular pass thru because you actually had to turn. There was only room for the washer and dryer. I don't even know if there was room for the soap! This was when I realized home designers typically don't get it right when they do the laundry rooms.
We must revolutionize the way home designers look at laundry rooms! Who's with me?
We can begin a campaign. Our motto could be - "Down With the Pass-Thrus - Up With the Mega Space!"
The next time you watch one of my listing videos, you might want to watch carefully to see if I squeal with delight at the size of the laundry room or if I groan.
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