Your laundry room is not too small. It is doing two jobs

Most houses have one room that everyone has quietly given up on. It is too small, or too dark, or it has become the place where things go when there is nowhere else. People live around it for years, and when they finally do something about it the instinct is to make it bigger.

Very often the room is not too small. It is being asked to do two jobs, and it is failing at both, and the house already contains the space to fix that.

A real example

A Love Your Nest client was frustrated with a tiny laundry room that was also serving as a makeshift mudroom for her two active young boys and her husband. Both of those are demanding uses. Laundry needs machines, folding surface and somewhere for baskets. A mudroom needs floor space, hooks, a place to sit and take boots off, and the tolerance to be wet and muddy. Putting them in one small room means the laundry is permanently blocked by coats and the coats are permanently damp from the dryer.

The fix did not involve building anything new. The home office next door was taken over and converted into a large laundry room. The old laundry became a proper mudroom, which was what the family needed it to be all along. The home office moved into the formal living room, a room that was barely being used. Three rooms changed jobs. The footprint of the house did not change at all.

How to tell if this is your problem

There are a few reliable signs that a room is mis-assigned rather than undersized.

• You describe the room with two nouns joined by a slash, as in laundry slash mudroom or office slash guest room
• One of its two uses always wins and the other is permanently in the way
• There is another room in the house you walk past and rarely enter
• Tidying it works for about a week, every time
• The thing that annoys you is not the size but the collision between two activities

The formal living room question

Every reassignment has a room at the end of the chain that gives something up. Very often it is the formal living room, and very often nobody minds. These rooms were designed for a pattern of entertaining that most households no longer practise, and they frequently sit at the front of the house doing nothing but being dusted.

It is worth being honest about this rather than sentimental. If you can remember the last three times a room was used, and all three were Christmas, it is a candidate. A home office in there is a room being used every weekday, which is a considerably better return on the square footage.

Lower levels are the same argument

Another Love Your Nest project dealt with a partially finished lower level that had turned into a catch all for surplus pantry items, exercise equipment and toys the children used only occasionally. It was not failing because it was too small. It was failing because it had never been assigned a purpose, so it absorbed whatever had nowhere else to go.

Given one, it worked: a kitchenette wet bar with a space saving floating bar for seating, a dedicated exercise area, real pantry storage instead of boxes on the floor, and room for a sectional large enough for a film. Same room, same dimensions, entirely different value to the household.

Where to start

Walk the house and write down what each room is genuinely used for, not what it is called on the floor plan. Then write down what you wish each one did. The mismatch between those two lists is usually the whole project, and it is often solvable by moving functions around rather than by building anything.

That is design work rather than construction work, which means it is cheap to explore and expensive to get wrong after the fact. Love Your Nest takes on single rooms and whole home planning across Greater Cleveland and Akron, and the fifteen minute discovery call is the place to describe the room you have given up on.