Building a Home – Laundry Room

Given the fact that I like to be organized and for everything to have a place it might be understandable that I’ve been really excited about my new laundry room.  Given my total disgust at having to do laundry day in and day out it might be less so.  But there are a lot of things that I’m excited about in our new laundry room and I’ve seen tons of pictures that have given me good ideas.

These are great pictures and I think we have a solid layout for the room but there are a few unknowns that I’m playing with right now that I would LOVE some help with.

For starters, we’re getting a new washer and dryer for our space.  We included ours in the purchase of our first home and so have no idea how old they are.  They work ok now but we would need to get a new dryer to make a shelf over the W/D work and so are planning on replacing them both.  But there are so many options out there these days that I’m overwhelmed!  Plus this decision is definitely one of the least important that we’re making right now so it’s been relegated to the bottom of the “to make” stack.  Is steam worth it?  Is there a brand that is more reliable than others? What do I need and what do I not need? If you have ANY opinions on front loading washer’s and dryer’s — especially if you have recommendations of makes/models to check out! — I would love to hear from you!

My second concern is what to put on the floor.  The downstairs will be hardwood which won’t go in the laundry.  Neither will the carpet from the bedrooms.  I could tile it but I dislike how the grout gets dirty in our current laundry room and I feel like it’s never clean (putting Luca in his own room would help this probably but might leave his room super dirty).  I would guess that concrete would be too heavy/cumbersome.  I’ve seen some cute vinyl flooring on Houzz and Pinterest recently but just the name of it doesn’t bring a lot of good pictures to my head.  Any suggestions would be appreciated!