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It all goes into the wash
When building or remodeling a house, tremendous thought goes into the design and decoration of the kitchen, the bedrooms, the bathrooms, every square foot of the home.
Meanwhile, the laundry room is an afterthought, a small room crammed into a corner of the basement. While my laundry room is on the same level as all the other rooms in the house, it is still delegated to a small room off the beaten path and it is about as attractive as the interior of our barn.
Yet, it is one of the most- used rooms in the house. Sure, the family eats in the kitchen every day, sleeps in the bedrooms every night and visits the bathrooms every morning. But the laundry room? That room is devoted to hours at a time. With a family of six, a majority of my time is spent in the laundry room.
I can't figure out how such little bodies manage to create such large piles of dirty clothing. (To cut down on the amount of laundry, I've learned to keep an eye out for still-folded jeans which accidentally fell into the clothes basket from the shelf above and for still-clean shirts which were tossed into the clothes hamper after the owner realized she outgrew the outfit two years ago.)
The laundry room has become so dominant in my life that my children already know to look for me in one of two places: either sitting in front of the computer in my office or standing next to the washing machine in the laundry room. Fortunately for them, the laundry room is on the way to the office so they save a few steps by stopping by there first. There is no other room in the house where I spend so much time awake that I now wonder why I didn't give more consideration to the laundry room when remodeling. Why shouldn't this room be the best designed, given the most consideration, be esthetically pleasing?
While laundry rooms are receiving more attention in design plans today, older rooms were designed around necessity and not comfort. I don't remember every nook and cranny of my family's laundry rooms growing up since, like now, the wash was delegated to my mother, but I do remember the requisite laundry chute.
(To this day, she says the biggest change around the house when my brother and I moved out was not the noise level or the food consumption but the laundry. With us gone, she barely had enough clothes to do a full load once a week.) In multi-level homes, laundry rooms usually had a chute to cut down on hauling dirty clothes around the house. Any opening connecting the upper-floor bedrooms and bathrooms with the basement-level wash rooms was asking for trouble. Neither my brother nor I ever fit completely through the chutes -- although I can't say we didn't try more than once.
The ideal room should be completely decorated, just as in any other room in the house. A pile of empty laundry soap containers could be replaced with a nice floral painting.
The mound of clothes waiting for buttons and patches could be hidden behind your dorm-sized fridge, complete with snacks and beverages. And that bare spot in the corner is crying out for a television, complete with a DVD player or at least a VCR. Once again, I spend enough time in the room that I could probably watch an entire movie in that time span. Most of my design energy is currently directed toward my laundry room. A new cabinet made with more oak than most entire kitchens went into the wash room.
New flooring is sitting in the basement, waiting to be installed. And I've been experimenting with different decorations for the walls, unsure what I want to stare at for hours on end. Just as the direction of design aspirations have changed in the past several years, so have my goals and accomplishments, which now both revolve around dirty clothes.
My major goal each week is to get the family's clothes washed, dried and -- most importantly -- put away before the dirty laundry baskets are full again. This has happened approximately twice in the past year, each time garnering a happy dance and a movie purchase for my future laundry room DVD collection.
-- Ronda Graff spends most of her time chasing four small children, feeding three large dogs, watching two expecting cats and cleaning one big, blue house.