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!

I would put shelves along the back wall for out of season storage. I would then have a rolling drawer/small dresser for in front of those part of those shelves. Drawers would be really hard to see into at 30". You will also be banging your head on the sloped ceiling. 50" isn't all that deep yet you will have to use space to step into the closet, so by having shelves you don't need to get into, you will bring the clothing you need to reach forward. I would also divide the space into at least a third with some type of wall so that you could put up double poles for hanging. Leave the one third part for long items. This closet is around 12" wide. That's a lot of space. What you decide for doors will factor into how to organze the items inside. Sliding doors seems to be about the only thing which would allow you to utilize the space without losing too much for walking. At 12 feet you could actually do two closets. One for hanging only and the other side for walking into with all of the drawers and shelves in a U shape. We have two storage areas with this type of configuration going down to 36". They are not practical for daily storage and getting in and out of. It works for our purposes, but I've wacked my head pretty hard a couple of times. My craft room has two sloped ceilings, but the back walls are 4.5 feet. Much better. Gloria

We'll need pictures of the floor plans to be most helpful. Here's my take on it. Upstairs is where the dirty bed/bath linens and underwear are generated, so I would do units up there for that so they don't have to be hauled upstairs when done (especially when pregnant.) Then downstairs, where you might want to iron (if you do that) keep the laundry chute for dropping the ironables to the main floor where the ironing board will be. Kitchen and other household laundry from the garage would be done there too. Pix would help us help you.

@cd7733 This is the old layout. We added a 30x30 addition to a Cape Cod. @Lindsey_CA Yes, it is pretty big. We are a family of seven. We have a 9 foot table that opens to 12 feet. We didn’t want to have to scoot around it on holidays/parties when more people were in there. When we took down the wall between the old kitchen and the old dining room, we just ended up with a really big room but it works for us. We put two accent chairs and a table on the end near the window and the other end had built-ins. @Mark Bischak Besides the dining room, which spaces do you think are too big? Our architect was going off of sizes that we told him we’d like to maintain in the rebuilt house. I definitely think the two bedrooms are too small and I don’t love the angled wall. Any ideas on how to get two bedrooms and a bath in there?