Just a thought ... I've seen some beautiful laundry rooms done with Ikea cabinets. I've seen it done in multi million dollar homes. Here is a link to two beautiful lottery homes. You'll see in the sources that many items came from Ikea in the laundry and I think they are beautiful. http://houseandhome.com/design/photo-gallery-2011-princess-margaret-showhome?page=32 http://houseandhome.com/design/photo-gallery-2010-princess-margaret-showhome?page=18 Here are some photos. Last two are Sarah Richardson with cabinets by Ikea.

I am firmly in the camp that believes having things too sterile is actually bad for your immune system. My great aunt, who lived to be 101 and a half, could eat things out of the refrigerator that none of us young people would touch. Her resistance to bacteria was good and built up over time and exposure. All that to say that if you are not phobic about what lurks in your laundry room, then having it serve mutliple purposes can be fabulous. If you, like several of my friends, constantly use hand sanitizer and try to eradicate every lurking germ, then you are not likely to be happy with having other activities happen next to where you wash soiled clothes. We recently did a renovation and decided to turning an old garage apartment into a multi-function space. It includes a laundry area, mudroom, pantry, office nook, and a small bathroom. The mudroom's French doors are where a garage door was 50 years ago and now open onto a smallish front porch that connects to our driveway. The mudroom is modest in scale. The doors let in lots of light. It has a little stool for the kids to sit down to take off their shoes, a low shelf for storage, several pegs for school bags, coats, and my cloth shopping bags, a small table for important papers the kids bring home, and a small tower with basket that hold sunglasses, a brush, pony tail holders, mittens, hats, etc. A large pantry opens at one end and the kitchen is up two steps at the other. From there a wide hallway opens into the laundry area in the middle section. The washer and dryer are front loaders and mount under a long counter with a deep sink at one end. There are cabinets above the laundry area that hold detergent, stain stick, vases, cleaning supplies, unmatched socks, tools we use often, seeds, etc. Eventually I hope to add a wall mounted drying rack to a space I left blank. I have had my eye on one in the Ballard Design catalog, but cannot yet spend the $$, The ironing board is mounted into the opposite wall and has a lamp, an intergrated plug, hook for hanging a couple of items, and a place to store the iron, hot or cold. The whole set up works beautifully for sorting, folding,and ironing laundry. Seems everyone is willing to help with the laundry now, because it is a pleasant place to be and well laid out. We have deep shelves built into a sort of wall cubbie. There we store two large laundry baskets on each shelf. Dirty clothes are on the bottom shelf, clean on the next. We also use the other cubbies for beach towels, pool bags, my "gift closet" and clothes that need to be donated or mended go on upper shelves, as they are culled during washing. My children never want to get rid of anything, so I have to sneak these out of their sight. I use the laundry sink for flower arranging, cleaning out coolers after a trip, and sometimes as a place to store wet dishcloths and dust rags (on a little rack that fits inside the sink) so they don't stink up the rest of the laundry until it is time to wash a whole load. The countertop serves mutliple purposes too. When clean laundry is put away it becomes a place for weighing food for our monthly co-op splits, drying art works, starting seeds in trays, polishing silver, etc. Instead of a powder room, we located a small, but full bathroom directly across from the laundry work space. Though we often set up a drying rack in the large shower, especially in winter, it is great this time of year to come in from the garden or back from the city pool and be able to take off dirty or wet clothes, hop in the shower, and throw stuff in the wash without tracking through multiple rooms. Towards the back of the house, still open to the laundry area, I have a built in desk with large triple windows over my work space. My computer, filing cabinets, and office supplies are there and it overlooks the prettiest part of our back yard. When I finally finsih cleaning out my boxes of files, we will be able to get to the door that leads out to the terrace. Other than the kitchen where I spent most of my time and even with boxed, it is still a nice space. If I had it to do over again, there would only be two changes I would want to make. First, I might make it a little bigger, as the children always want to be here with me and I would love to have a work space for them too. Second, I would add a bar for hanging up clean clothes until we take them upstair. I asked the cabinet contractor to do this as part of his work, but it didn't happen. I have since decided I would prefer the drying rack for now anwyway, but if I had more room, I would add a small closet or hanging bar. Happy deciding! Perhaps I can post some photos soon.

Updated with cabinet drawing...

It would help if you were to post your plan. It sounds like a lot of your cost is coming from the hardware to add pullouts. They are nice, but if you're trying to trim costs that would be the place to start imo. Just going off your description: -Could you install the folding counter over your washer and dryer? Or if finances are very tight, just fold on top of the machines. Of course this advice is irrelevant if they are stacked. But if you eliminate the pullout trash can and laundry baskets you should have room to have the machines side by side. -use an off-the-shelf utility sink with cabinet underneath. We got one on sale for a couple of hundred dollars with faucet included. -in the space next to the utility sink, hang a retractable clothes drying rack on the wall. They range in price from $50-$100+ and are much more versatile than a hanging rod. You can hang clothes on hangers from them, use jumbo size clips to line dry an entire load of clothes, lay a sweater on the bars to dry it flat, drape a couple of things over temporarily. -add a laundry sorter under the drying rack, or use individual laundry baskets. -a hidden garbage is really nice in the kitchen because nasty things go in a kitchen garbage. In the laundry room, the only thing that goes in my garbage is dryer lint and the occasional holey sock. So being hidden isn't as important imo, and actually I get better user compliance with an open garbage that people can access without too much thought.