I grew up in a home in which the laundry machines were hidden in the basement. The basement was joyless with bare concrete floors, exposed pipes running here and there, eerie shadows cast by a couple of bare bulbs dangling from the ceiling, and the faint scent of detergent mixed with musty boxes of who-knows-what piled in a corner. Our ping-pong table doubled as a folding table. We carried the laundry up and down two flights of stairs, lots and lots of it, and were reminded that this was "better than working in the salt mines" as if we had luckily dodged the prospect of child labor elsewhere.

We've since been convinced of the merits of bedroom-floor laundry with fewer stairs and shorter distances. We recently added second-floor laundry in a whole-home renovation that included tough porcelain floor tile, quartz countertops to withstand most anything, and plenty of storage: sage green cabinets, machines mounted on pedestals that double as drawers, and even space to mount a rod for hanging delicates. Not bad for a room that measures 8' x 6', and all behind a pocket door to preserve square feet. A friend joked "it's like doing laundry in the Hamptons," and we'll take that description over a slightly scary basement any day of the week.