My floorplan has a closet off the mudroom. It isn't huge, but we do plan on having a section of it for shoe storage so we aren't hauling shoes up and down the stairs anymore. My husband and I are quasi-minimalists, so we certainly wouldn't know what to do with a 15' x 15' shoe closet! Currently all of my shoes fit on a 18" wide floor-to-ceiling section of closet, and my husband's take up slightly less space. The rest of the mudroom closet will be for hockey gear, coats, snow gear, etc. (We also live up north, in Minnesota.) An island in the mudroom would be great if you have the space! I wish we could have an island space in the master closet, specifically for packing/unpacking suitcases. My husband travels about 1 night per week for work, so his suitcase basically lives on the bedroom floor in between trips. I am sick of tripping over it!

Annette, thank you for taking the time to answer. Apologies for the very rough sketch. I didn't explain that we will be adding the envisioned left hand wall, sectioning off the new laundry space from the current open garage space. The elevator and space at the bottom of the sketch are in the interior of the house. The door between the elevator and the stairs opens from the foyer into the garage. The closet I have drawn in there, we have now decided will be added to the laundry room and not the foyer. The lines I have drawn in the middle of the left hand wall will be stairs going down to the lower level of the garage. There will be a door there. The sketch I have drawn correlates to the right hand section of the blueprint. The perspective would be the equivalent of the first photograph. The new wall will be placed where the dotted line is in the blue print . Am I making more sense? (or any sense.... ;) ) I agree with you about putting the dryer on the exterior wall. I'm not sure why my contractor boyfriend is so insistent on them not being on an exterior wall. Were the Fl units you were using in the house on pedestals or without? I feel without the pedestals they will be ok. I'm short: 5'4"

In the laundry room in my apartment building's basement, there's a Formica table just for folding clothes. I find that I will fold the clothes as I take them out because there's a table right there to do it on. When I was growing up, we didn't have that in the laundry room--we brought the clothes into the living room (or dining room) and folded them onto the sofa (or dining table--but it was usually busy with other stuff). When we first moved into this apartment, I would bring the clothes upstairs to fold so I could be with my husband instead of downstairs on my own, and fold them onto the couch. But in those "folding onto the couch" situations, the clothes would often not GET folded. Now I take advantage of the infrastructure available to me, and it adds so much order to my life. What I WISH I had is an ironing board and iron right there, next to the dryer, so I could take a kitchen towel out and say, "Ooh, I should touch up this wrinkled edge, and be able to do it right away (OK, I'd have to plug in the iron at that point, but by the time I'd taken three other T-shirts out of the dryer, it would be ready for me to iron the towel, and the handkerchief, and the crinkled up edges of the sheets, etc.). I had a friend whose apartment had a little dressing room / sitting room off the room he used for his bedroom, and he left his ironing board and iron up all the time. If his shirt needed pressing, it was NO time at all to do so. Me, I have to get my ironing board out of the closet in the other room, and get the iron out of where IT is stored separately, so I never use it. I keep trying to find a way to store them together easily, and so far it's not working out. The place I could put them, I don't have a good way to hook up to power and the set-up space is not very good. So I have to take them in the other room, one way or another, and that's just too much for three handkerchiefs, or a single shirt. I'm kind of jealous of your future laundry room!

I did not do the final designs you see. I used PAINT, but then my cabinet designer drew what you see above. The shelves in my study sit on top of an air return box (the grill is facing in the hall behind the study wall. I added a photo of that. Grill outlines in white.) Since there was this large hump sticking out in the study, I decided that the space above could be put to good use. I did a similar thing in the back of our house. Air return in hallway. Bump out was in my closet. I built shelves about it for pocketbooks. You could build a cabinet with doors above your air return.