An idea for a floorplan (floor, washer, insulated, loading)

[Neosec]

Had this idea years ago, what do you think?

This would be for a higher end home with enough square footage (meters) to allow for walk in closets. Over the years I've seen several houses with laundry facilities on a different floor than the bedrooms or sometimes, in the garage. Cloths are carried from bedrooms to some distant laundry room and back again for decades.

I thought, why not put the laundry where the clothes are. The design I came up with puts the laundry central. Middle of the floor. It is surrounded by walk-in closets from the bedrooms around its perimeter.

So each bedroom has a walk-in and at the back of each walk-in closet is a door that leads to the laundry room. The walls of the laundry room should be insulated for sound deadening purposes.

The idea is that now the laundry facility is where the cloths are. No need to haul laundry off to some distant washer/dryer. If you like to line-dry, consider putting the laundry room against an exterior wall with a sliding patio door and a cloths line rigged up, or drying racks.

[rrtechno]

You are going to need to have an awfully large laundry room if you want all those doors in it. You will be losing the width of each door as usable wall space.

Say for example you have 4 bedrooms, each with that walk in closet leading to the laundry. You will be losing roughly 12 feet of usable wall space just in doors to the bedroom closets.

Personally I am not a fan of sliding patio doors either. I think there are better options for energy efficiency.

It would be interesting to see a sketch of what you have visualized for the laundry room arrangement, though.

[Pitt Chick]

Let us see your floorplan, Neosec!

[Neosec]

Really quick and dirty...

[prosopis]

We did something like this, but we only have two closets with the laundry between them. It is really nice to have all the clothing facilities right there.

Another way to approach this if you want to cut down on doors is to have a laundry room with a door at each end and a short hall going between the closets on each side. You could then have 4 to 6 closets total without having tons of doors in the laundry room.

[Pitt Chick]

Ah... I really don't see the sketch as practical.
Too much wasted closet space due to doors.... and getting to the various bedrooms would require plenty of hallways.

[jetgraphics]

My personal preference is to use closets as sound barriers to adjacent bedrooms.

[piscesinphoenix]

You are right. The laundry room should be where the laundry is generated: bathrooms, bedrooms. If your plan is going to have one main bathroom for the other three bedrooms, I'd locate the laundry in the bathroom and put in a central drain, in case of overflow from tub, sink, toilet, washer. You could plan for a hobby room that incorporates the laundry-ironing-sewing functions.

Your plan, while interesting, would allow a lot of free access to every other bedroom on the floor (privacy/safety issues) unless the bedroom doors were treated as, say, a hotel's adjoining room idea. Locking all those doors would be impractical and defeat the purpose.
For your laundry room set-up, you might want to locate the laundry sink next to or between the washer and dryer (though in its present plan that would cut out one door). Less mopping when loading pre-soaked items, also so they wouldn't need separate plumbing.

A tip for the main floor: the garage should be off the kitchen-mud room, which should be located near where the garbage is picked up. Carrying armloads of groceries to a kitchen located far away from the drop-off point is back-breaking and you track in and spread whatever dirt and debris is in the garage throughout the house. Same is true in reverse with the trash going out to the main pickup area; whatever is leaky is going to be dripped and dribbled from the kitchen to the trash outside.
Good Luck.

[mapmd]

Originally Posted by Neosec

Had this idea years ago, what do you think?

This would be for a higher end home with enough square footage (meters) to allow for walk in closets. Over the years I've seen several houses with laundry facilities on a different floor than the bedrooms or sometimes, in the garage. Cloths are carried from bedrooms to some distant laundry room and back again for decades.

I thought, why not put the laundry where the clothes are.

In the multi-million dollar homes that we build if there is only one set of a washer and dryer it will usually go on the same floor as the master bedrooms.

Often there are two laundry rooms. And more often that not these people are going to have full-time maid staff anyway, which makes placement of the laundry rooms somewhat moot.

In one of the houses we're working on now there is a maid room and the laundry area is in a "closet" (about the size of my childhood bedroom) tucked behind that room. Downstairs there is also a butler pantry and prep area in addition to the actual cooking room which is then removed from the two dining rooms. Apparently these people plan on having feasts, but since they've made thousands of changes there house won't be done until around March/April now (so much for Thanksgiving).

I'm happy with just eating on the breakfast bar in my kitchen and being able to reach behind me to open the fridge! Something to be thankful for. I'm also thankful to be working on houses, I like seeing how they're built. Kinda neat, and I get to see the gluttony in this county...and these types of people aren't even in the oligarch class.

On the opposite edge of the spectrum I get to see how I don't want to live: in 50+ year old crumbling homes, and especially not in a hoarder house. Remodels are always fun in those. Thanks boomers. I'm thankful to be learning a lot about life and lifestyles right now.

[Neosec]

Excellent feedback! There are many problems that I didn't consider since I never fully developed the floor plan. Instead of just abandoning an idea and saying it can't be done, I feel motivated to think of, how it can be done.

I won't be building a house any time soon so this is useless to me... and maybe everyone. Just something to tuck in the back of your mind and perhaps a better idea will be borne from it.

Happy Thanksgiving!