Finding Peace in an Unexpected Part of My Home

Here’s a room you won’t hear too many people raving about: the basement laundry room. Until recently, you wouldn’t have heard me raving about mine either. My laundry room started out as a disaster, but it has morphed into a room that brings me peace and clarity—an unexpected bright star during a moment of relative darkness in this homebound world of mine.

The room itself has undergone several permutations, both technical and spatial. These days it has a new DIY countertop fashioned from a set of butcher-block-topped cabinets rescued from a demolition sale. The walls that were once an unwelcoming purple are now a soothing robin’s-egg blue. We replaced the actual washing machine and dryer right when we moved in, two years ago, and the remaining room has been a work in progress—or it was, at least, until we found ourselves at home for the past few months. That’s when my husband did some minor tweaks to the layout, which changed a room that I saw as a necessary appendage—and, for the most part, an inconvenience—into a soothing respite from my life.

Laundry is, naturally, the bane of my domestic existence, but, as with many of my pandemic chores, I’ve gained a new appreciation for laundry-doing in this specific moment. Repetition is ordinary. Repetition is boring. Repetition is also something I have complete and total control over. The world outside the confines of my home—outside the confines of my laundry room, even—may be frothing over with chaos, but here, in my new favorite room, there is no clutter. Cabinets hide wayward cleaning supplies. Laundry baskets are stacked on countertops and off the floor. Opening the doors, I find an overwhelming sense of peace, because this is a place where the world makes sense.

Every time I walk in, I marvel: It’s lighter in there than I ever remember. There’s so much...space! It feels like a real luxury to have a room like this, a room I never thought I’d care all that much about. In restaurants, where I worked for years, we use an expression to denote preparedness for service: mise en place. Everything in its place. In my laundry room every object has a home, a calming salve to a world where chaos reigns.

I still have dreams, of course, in some distant and tucked-away corner of my brain, of the home that I may or may not own someday. That home has one more bedroom than this one, plus a screened-in porch and a garage. It has a bathtub in the master and a sunny office with floor-to-ceiling bookshelves, and maybe even a fireplace. That’s a faraway dream.

My imaginary house used to have a laundry room on the main level, for purposes of convenience—less walking, less carrying, less schlepping—but now maybe I’m rethinking that too. There’s a destination, I find, in walking downstairs into a room that’s peaceful and hidden away from everything else. I didn’t realize I was seeking solace when we moved into a house that happened to have a laundry room in the basement. Sometimes our homes create the destinations for us. For me, that destination isn’t so far away, really, just down a set of stairs and behind a set of double doors into a room that I never expected to embrace as my own. 

Originally Appeared on Architectural Digest