Cure the Laundry Room Blues
By Kathy McCleary,
special to HGTV.com
I've lived in four houses since I got
married, and the laundry rooms in all of
them have had three consistent factors:
Basements, cement and small,
mud-spattered windows. This is pretty
pathetic, considering how much of my
life I spend in the laundry room.
On any given day,
28 million Americans are doing
laundry-related chores, according to
research done in 2003 by Whirlpool
Corp., which wants consumers to rethink
the laundry room as a "family studio," a
place with a hobby and craft center, TV
and games "where your family values are
nurtured," as one press release states.
Since family values are seldom nurtured
in my laundry room, where someone is
usually complaining or arguing about the
laundry, it may be time to rethink my
laundry room's somewhat dungeon-like
demeanor.
Laundry rooms are
a key focus for many consumers now, with
high-end washers and dryers (complete
with colored finishes) leading the
charge. Manufacturers shipped more than
16.7 million washers and dryers to
stores in 2004, according to the
Association of Home Appliance
Manufacturers. That number is expected
to jump to 17.4 million in 2006.
Lynne Stephenson,
co-owner of HUB Design/Build in
Villanova, Pa., says laundry rooms have
been a part of 75 percent of the home
remodeling projects they've drawn up
this year. "Laundries have definitely
been a focus," Stephenson says, who
attributes the interest to the
introduction of those tony washers and
dryers several years ago. After all, who
wants to put $2,000 worth of washer and
dryer into a cinder-block basement?
An informal survey
of members of the National Association
of the Remodeling Industry unearthed
stories of recent laundry room projects
that included dog-washing stations;
craft tables; lockers for each family
member; smart-house technology with
video cameras, speakers and telephones;
a butler's pantry; a workshop; and
custom finishes, including marble
counter tops, marble tile walls and
custom cabinetry.
Designers and
contractors also report that a majority
of customers want the laundry room moved
out of the basement and onto the second
floor, where the dirty laundry is
generated. "Clients don't want to walk
to the basement to do laundry, period,"
says Kirk Moffitt, president of Moffitt
Construction in Chicago, Ill. Although,
he adds, "they must not have seen the
Brady Bunch episode when Bobby
flooded the kitchen with bubbles."
While marble finishes and butler's
pantries and even a move to the second
floor are not in the immediate future
for my laundry room, I did gather some
excellent ideas for jazzing the room up
without ripping down walls. Consider the
following:
What do you
really do there?
User habit is a key factor in planning
your laundry room. "People will go to a
lot of expense and build a beautiful
laundry room with all this counter
space," says professional organizing
consultant Vicki Norris, "but then mom
doesn't fold laundry in the laundry
room; she dumps it on the couch and
folds it while she's watching Oprah."
If that's your style, you may want to
mount a TV on the wall in the laundry
room so you can see it from your folding
counter, or you may want to continue
folding laundry on the couch and not
include too much counter space in your
laundry room.
Since laundry is a
key part of what you do there, make sure
the room works for getting the laundry
done. If your laundry room is just six
feet by six feet, for instance, you have
to have enough room to open the door of
your dryer before you think about
putting in shelves.
You'll also want
to consider wall-mounted shelves that
are higher up so you have the necessary
clearance around the dryer door. You
need to fit laundry supplies close to
the washer and dryer, so make sure
shelves are the right width (too deep
means supplies end up hidden behind each
other so you over buy; too narrow and
you can't fit in wide jugs).
What do you
want to do there?
Your laundry room, if it's anything like
mine, may be a dumping ground for all
kinds of items, from gift wrap to
cleaning supplies.
"It's a space like the garage or a
closet that can become a catchall
space," says Norris, president of
Restoring Order in Portland, Oregon. She
suggests taking absolutely everything
out of your laundry room and defining
how you want to use that space. If your
laundry room is also going to be an arts
and crafts room, for example, then
gather every last paintbrush and hot
glue stick from every corner of the
house and put them together in one spot.
Go out and purchase the plastic bins you
need to hold it all, and then figure out
if it's all actually going to fit in
your laundry room. "You want to make
sure you're not overshooting the space
you have with 12 boxes of art and craft
supplies," Norris says.
Norris teaches clients the "only
principle": If you're going to use your
laundry room for laundry, crafts and to
store cleaning supplies, for example,
then only items related to those three
functions should be in the room. So the
games and puzzles and batteries and
flashlights go out; every bottle of
Windex and every magic marker come in.
What makes you
happy?
The color red? Orlando Bloom? Hawaii?
"You don't have to stick to all the
rules that the rest of the house has,"
says
Mark McCauley, author of Color
Therapy at Home (Rockport, 2000) and
senior designer at Darleen's Interiors
in Naperville, Ill. "In the laundry room
you can do whatever you want."
Vicki Norris' laundry room includes a
display of vintage soapboxes, two
vintage washboards and a display of
retro aprons on the wall. She bought a
large, old-fashioned metal milk jug to
hold her laundry detergent. "It just
makes it more enjoyable to do a chore
you have to do every day."
A few guidelines
for indulging your whimsy:
- Be careful with
color. Deeply hued wall colors will
reflect on to the clothes, making it
hard to see stains or how clean they
are, says McCauley. He suggests
painting just one wall a bright color
and leaving the others neutral. Since
many laundry rooms use fluorescent
light, which has a blue cast, neutrals
with yellow undertones will help
combat the blue. Bright colors also
are fine in borders near the ceiling,
McCauley says.
- Make sure you
have adequate lighting. The laundry
room is a work area, and you need to
be able to see what you're doing. If
you're doing ironing or sewing,
consider task lighting, like an
architect's lamp with an incandescent
bulb.
- Bring in
artwork. "If you've always loved
Starry Night, by Van Gogh, hang it
in the laundry room to give yourself
something to look at while waiting for
the towels to dry," says McCauley.
Peggy Sellwood, interior designer with
P.S. Designs in Minneapolis, says the
laundry room is a terrific spot to
frame and display children's artwork.
"Make a little gallery in the laundry
room," she says. "My son is 31 now and
I still have one of the famous little
drawings he did hanging on my wall."
- Pick a theme.
Sellwood decorated a Minnetonka,
Minn., home in a Southwestern theme
and continued that design thread into
the laundry room. She painted the
walls terra cotta, made a lamp out of
an old cowboy boot, and used a pair of
garage-sale shutters to cover a
storage cabinet. "The homeowner says
every time she walks in that room it
puts a smile on her face," Sellwood
says. "Alice in Wonderland,
1950s automobiles, swimming
pools--pick a favorite motif,"
McCauley says. Display all the
souvenirs you bought back from your
recent trip to Hawaii, for instance,
and give the room a tropical theme.
"Fill it with things that remind you
of a time when you were happier than
when you're doing the laundry," says
McCauley.
Changing your
laundry room may even change your
attitude about laundry. Mark McCauley
finds laundry "a pretty depressing
event," in spite of his sage-green
laundry room. But Peggy Sellwood decked
out her laundry room with a realistic
brick wallpaper, an elegant crystal
chandelier and a variety of artwork,
including an old print she bought in
Russia. "I love doing laundry," she
says. "When I go into my laundry room,
it's a comfort."
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