A bigger laundry room

The "ideal house" category is our place to catalog our hare-brained ideas and dreams for the house that we'll maybe build one day, as well as a forum for venting frustrations about the lame building and design choices of our current suburban box.

My bedroom is covered with clothing. Part of this is an aesthetic choice -- my room is the one part of the house that I keep closed off from visitors at all times, so if there's laundry unfolded it gets dumped in row of baskets in front of the dresser. But it's also a storage necessity. As I fold clothes, I sort through them and pack away any that the girls have outgrown and store them in boxes -- which live in my room so that I don't have to schlep down to the garage with every t-shirt or skirt that needs to be put away.

My current laundry room is about five feet square and just big enough to allow the washer and dryer to be opened and to hold a folded up ironing board, and a trash can. In my ideal house, the laundry room would be big enough to contain boxes of clothes in storage and a table for folding clothes. And a rack for hanging drip-dry items so I didn't have to balance hangers on the door frame or use the shower curtain rod in the bathroom. And a window would be nice.

I do like that the laundry room is upstairs so that I don't have to haul everything downstairs.