What are your goals for the closet? That might shake some posters out of the trees. Personally, I'd do double doors, maybe even split half way up, so you have upper and lower double doors. OK, while I'm dreaming, bottom half would be a laundry bin. Top half storage. The way the tile is cut is problematic. AO may be able to get you a similar color in octagon and dot. Otherwise, what about buying white octagon and dot, then painting with color-matched epoxy paint before you grout? Alternatively, a clever threshold (clever because It would have to project out a bit into the room bc of that unfortunate tile cut) could bridge the space into the closet. You could get the threshold made out of anything that looks simpatico to your overall bath; marble is common, or black granite, travertine, painted or stained wood (easier to shape and cut into place!). If you did that, no need to match tile for the closet floor. In that case I'd get floor paint and paint the closet floor a color that gets along with your tile. I have a closet in my bath and the depth makes it difficult to get full use of the space in it. We use a lot of bins and trays, so we can pull them out and get what we want, or access less frequently used items stored behind them. That tile, by the way, is a beautiful, distinctive color. It may be harder to work with than many of the white tile bathrooms you see here, but I hope you keep it. It looks great! (And best of all, it doesn't look like a million other bathrooms.)

I would say that the transom could be the same material with the same pattern, it could be the same shape with a single lite (which would be transitional really but that's ok) or it could be rectangular with upright rectangular divided lites. The mirror idea, to me anyway, is only effective if you are doing it where you actually Couldn't or Wouldn't Want to have real windows. I think the important thing to maintain with the number of openings that are adjacent here (5?), and the number of doors to be used here (5-6?) is some sort of consistency or logic behind the choices. I think if you don't have a leaded surround right at the front, you probably should not do it on the inner doors because it adds another material. Likewise the solid doors should have some kind of pattern relationship with the other solid doors, and the doors with glazing should have some kind of pattern relationship with the other glazed doors...and ideally they should have a relationship with each other as well.

hi mara! Unfortunately, I think laundry in the basement is the only option for this house unless we want to give up one of the second floor bedrooms (which I don't think makes sense and would entail WAY more intrusive construction than we want). I agree that it's not ideal, but it is what it is. I sketched out a couple of ideas for the basement space...would you mind taking a look? Here is the current basement overall. The door on the right by the toilet leads to the new part of the basement under our kitchen addition. That space is already finished and is what I'm calling potential guest room/man cave. It has outside egress through a pair of "Dorothy doors". So the way it is now you come down stairs from the breakfast room into an unfinished basement with a cement floor, low ductwork and rubble stone walls and wind your way past open laundry, furnace, a non-functioning toilet in a tiny wood enclosure to reach the nice finished space. It's a pretty odd setup. The black dots in the sketch are steel support beams. We had an HVAC guy out yesterday who can fix most of the ducting issues. Our thought is to drywall the whole left section of the basement, adding lots of lighting and tile or pergo floors. This will give us a 12' by 24' rec room (we currently have a smallish living room and no family room upstairs, so I think this space will be important to future buyers). The plan is to use the upper right quadrant of the space for the utility functions of the basement: laundry, bathroom, furnace room. Plumbing and gas lines are already there, so I think this makes sense. It also has to serve as the hallway to the new portion of the basement. My husband's beloved workshop would get drywall and a door, but would otherwise be untouched. Here is the idea that I think I like best so far. A stacking washer and dryer and the laundry sink would be behind double pocket doors. The pocket doors would open all the way and stow in the wall by the shower. There would be a cabinet with storage below and space to fold laundry just opposite the laundry. There could be an upper cabinet or open shelves above. Access to the storage closet (which will have pretty low headroom due to ducting) would be from the rec room. Here is the other idea that I'm also considering. The stacked washer/dryer and sink would be behind double doors that swing open on heavy-duty hinges. On the inside of the left door, I could hang my iron and ironing board. On the inside of the right door would be a fold-down table. The right door would open all the way against the wall backing up to the shower and the table (I think it could be about 3' by 2') would unfold into the hallway space. In this plan, the access to the storage closet would be across from the laundry. If I wanted to keep the washer and dryer side-by-side and still have a sink, I'd have to put the sink where the shower is in the sketches above. I think it makes more sense to stack machines, keep to a smaller laundry footprint, and have a full bath with shower. So what do you think? Are either of these pretty decent substitutes for a laundry room? Thanks so much for taking the time to look and to make it through all of my rambling!

Wow - thanks for all the feedback! Still digesting it all but here's some random late-night thoughts. I do see his point about the doors. On our main floor (which is obviously heated and air conditioned) we have a few doors made from tongue and groove pine in the barn door style and they have warped and flexed -- in the summer, they swell and stick, in the winter, they warp. I consider it part of the charm of the house but I could definitely see how that much movement might cause problems on a sliding track. hoosiergirl - those look like the doors I found that are a thousand bucks a door! They are cool though! natal - those drapes look cool, but those openings are small. I can't picture 18 feet of drapes....that seems overwhelming to me. All the suggestions for built-ins and such would be wonderful, but we're pretty far along so I think it would be costly to change now. Besides, the things that are getting stored here aren't pretty (rubbermaid tubs full of thomas tracks and other random toys) so I definitely like the idea of closed doors. My kids are 6 and 9 so I'm thinking they shoudl be able to manage the doors without hurting themselves. And once we outgrow the need for this much toy storage, I plan to fill the closet up with christmas decorations and sporting equipment and other bulky ugly stuff anyhow. So anyhow, right now, my current thinking is to use 5 completely flat doors and one paneled one (I didn't want to confuse you in the original post, but one of the doors needs to have a grille in it because the dehumidifier will live in this closet as well. So I was thinking of cutting the middle panel out of the single flat panel door (thanks for the correct term bronwynsmom!) and replacing it with metal grille to allow for air circulation to the dehumidifier section of the closet. I was even thinking I could bolt two doors together into a 6 foot door (maybe even use wood putty to hide the "seam" down the middle - think that would work?). Then I'd have 3 6ft doors that I'd just paint with chalkboard paint for now. The plain flat door blanks are dirt cheap so I could try this approach for now and, if I wasn't happy with it, I guess I could try building my own barn doors later. There are two things that concern me about this plan though -- one is that the end door would actualy have one flat door and one paneled door bolted together (to allow for the air grille) - that might look dumb. Plus with the 6 foot doors, there will be alot of the area covered at any point in time -- one of the tracks is always going to have 12ft of door on it. Versus if I just hung the 3 ft doors alternating -- then I'd have each track with 9 ft, exposing an additional 3 ft with the doors all the way open. I suppose I could get around this by having 3 separate tracks instead of 2, but I'm not sure the door opening has the extra depth for that and we're hemmed in by ductwork so I don't know if we could make the space if we wanted to. I'm terrible with visualizing stuff like this in my head, so I think I need to draw it out on paper. Bronwynsmom -- the idea you describe about jointing two paneled door blanks together - can you explain it again? I've read your paragraph over and over and it sounds intriguing, but I'm not quite getting exactly what you're describing. Anyhow, thanks again for the feedback. I've got a few days to figure it out, so keep any ideas coming!