As an Austin Realtor, I see many houses.  Do you ever walk into a house and wonder what they were thinking? Well, I do it all of the time, often when it comes to the placement of utility rooms or closets. The truth of the matter is that ‘they’, were not thinking. I experienced this during my own custom build. You get so caught up in designing the kitchen and master bedroom, that the utility room becomes an after thought. The placement of the washer and dryer often become a matter of where you can fit it, in relation to the plumbing. People with children open their washing machine, almost as often as they open the refrigerator. If the secondary bedrooms are on the upper level, you are not going to walk the laundry downstairs, across the kitchen to a hallway, which holds the washing machine, but the back door to the house as well. Families need room to do laundry.