Laundry Room: Inside or Outside?
Sophia and I grew up in homes with both the washer and dryer in the garage. The two car garage supported a nook for the laundry set up. It was common in our neck of the woods in California for our neighbors to have their laundry in the garage or in a small area inside the house. Nowadays there are many creative ways to incorporate washers and dryers into a separate room or inside a hallway closet of sorts. There are stackable units, large combo units, small 24 inch wide machines for small apartments and homes. Today the laundry world has seen much upgrades since the days when Sophia and I were growing up.
When we decided to take on our first renovation project we came across some challenges with differences of opinions on where the laundry should go. In older parts of town such as the Centro Histórico in Mazatlán, it’s common to see shacks either outside the patio or upstairs on the roof with a long clothesline extending from one end to the other.
It’s very normal and often encourages to have the all the laundry take place outdoors in the open elements. Instead of using gas which can get expensive to operate a dryer to dry the clothes, why not hang it on the clothesline so the heat from the sun can dry your clothes naturally? And yet, while it makes sense to us the process was foreign and new to us.
We were not expecting the location of our laundry units to be a bigger decision to tackle. Why? It all started when we had our engineer provide us with a copy of the existing floor plan for the house, Constitución 1025, that we wanted to restructure with all the current walls in place. We were tasked to use it as a framework to design a more efficient layout that we felt was going to be best suited for the house.
After some back and forth discussions on how we wanted to redesign the floor plan and after throwing out drafts we didn’t like, we handed a copy of our redesigned floor plan to our engineer to review with him. The very first question he had was, “Why do you have the laundry room inside the house? It needs to go outside where the utility sink will go.” Utility sink? No thank you. It caught us off guard to have fierce opposition to the request of an indoor laundry unit.
The only explanation for why we should move the units outside was because that’s how it’s done in Mexico. Huh? That’s why? No other reason except just that one. Because we have a little bit of pride in our own upbringing with the indoor laundry units we countered and put our foot down. The final decision to keep it indoors was not a happy one for the engineer, but we were able to successfully persuade him to move forward with the final floor plan that included an interior laundry area.
As soon as renovations began, we went out of town for a few weeks to Scandinavia to attend our friend’s wedding. Upon our return we were anxious to see the progress that had been made on the house in our absence.
Much to our surprise our engineer took it upon himself to make a nook in the back patio for a laundry room even though our plan was to have the units inside. When asked why he moved it there he simply said, “I put it there just in case you decide to change your mind and have the laundry room outside.”
We weren’t pleased, to say the least, and we asked him to remove the space in the back patio. Fast forward a few weeks and we made some more progress on the remodel. We got renders done to show our vision of bringing the laundry indoors. Seeing the renders helped give our engineer some perspective on what we wished to have in our first house flip.
What do you think? Would you rather have your laundry unit outside the house or in? Send us your comments and let us know what you think!