A Generation Gap in the Laundry Room

Your preference about the location of your washer and dryer may reveal as much about your age as do the clothes you put in them.

Younger buyers of new homes prefer a laundry room near the bedrooms, said Gopal Ahluwalia, staff vice president of research at the National Association of Home Builders. Older buyers, more wary of leaks and noise, prefer to keep their machines on the main level of the home, often near the kitchen.

Overall, statistics reflect the tastes of younger buyers. According to NAHB surveys, 37 percent of new-home buyers prefer a location near the bedrooms; 20 percent prefer a spot near the kitchen; 17 percent still like the old-fashioned choice, the basement; and 12 percent prefer to keep their washer and dryer in the garage.

Trends in new homes eventually translate into existing neighborhoods as homeowners remodel. The good news for anyone planning a renovation is that no one spot is emerging as an absolute trend. A distinct laundry room, even if it's just a converted closet, will be an asset when it's time to sell.

Locating the wash near the bedrooms takes more careful planning than placing it near the kitchen or making the machines stars of a new mudroom. You're talking about bringing machinery into the quiet part of your home, after all. If the bedrooms are on the second floor, you need to be particularly careful that leaks wouldn't damage finished spaces downstairs.

Todd Virts, a designer with P.A. Portner, a remodeling company in Gaithersburg, recommends against moving the laundry to a second-story bedroom area. "I used to encourage people to put them there because that's where the clothes are," Virts said. "But I stopped. People are too worried about floods and vibration."

He said he has been asked to move some laundry rooms back downstairs because the homeowners said the machines caused too much disturbance. "There's no way to completely eliminate that vibration," Virts said. "You can minimize it." It's more likely to trigger complaints if the machine is on a wooden floor, which is what you'll almost always find upstairs. On a concrete slab in the basement or ground level, you would barely notice it.

Because they're easy to stack in a closet-size area, high-efficiency front-loaders are an attractive choice near the bedrooms. But those are the machines most likely to annoy.

The drum in a front-loader rotates at a higher speed than in a conventional top-loader. This wrings extra water out of the clothes, allowing for a quicker, cheaper spell in the dryer, but the high-speed spin cycle can cause annoying vibration.

Audrey Reed-Granger, a spokeswoman for Whirlpool, said the company added shock absorbers to its high-efficiency front loaders about two years ago to address the problem. "It was most certainly a legitimate issue," she said. "That was the reason we did it. A lot of contractors and builders were not reinforcing the second floor." It's not an issue with top-loaders, which constitute 70 percent of the washing-machine market, she said.

Reed-Granger said Whirlpool's research, which includes owners of older homes as well as new ones, shows that 55 percent of buyers place their machines on the first floor and 12 percent place them on the second floor. "A lot of consumers now are more concerned about sound, especially on that second floor," she said.

Mudrooms near the kitchen or garage entrance are a popular location for the laundry, especially in new homes. They allow space for storage, folding tables, a utility sink and laundry baskets. "I've seen people who want TV in the laundry room," Ahluwalia said. He seemed surprised by the idea, but that's a laundry accessory that makes perfect sense to me. Maybe then I would quit folding sheets in the middle of the family room.