Laundry room design in a Burnaby custom home: where it goes and why

Ask most owners to walk you through the plans for their new house and they will start at the front door, move to the kitchen, linger in the primary suite, and skip the laundry entirely. Then they move in and stand in that room four times a week for the next twenty years.

Where the laundry goes shapes more than convenience. It sets which wall carries a drain stack, which exterior wall gets a dryer vent, which bedroom shares a wall with a spinning washer, and whether the basement suite tenant ever has to walk through the main house. On a two or three storey Burnaby custom home, here is how we make that call and the details we build in once it is made.

Three places it can go

Upstairs, by the bedrooms. This is our default on a Brentwood or Burnaby Heights family home, and it is where we steer most clients. Clothes come off in the bedrooms, get washed twenty feet away, and go back into the walk-in closets on the same floor. Nobody carries a basket down two flights of stairs and back up. The cost is that you are putting a water-filled machine above finished ceilings, which changes how the room has to be built. More on that below.

Off the mudroom. On a house with kids in sports, a dog, or a garden, the laundry next to the mudroom catches the dirt where it enters. Muddy gear goes straight from the bench into the washer without touching a hallway. The trade-off is that clean clothes then have to travel to the bedrooms, and the main-floor laundry uses up floor area on the level where every square foot is contested. We see this work best when the mudroom laundry is a second set of machines, or when the primary bedroom is also on the main floor.

Basement. The easiest to plumb, the easiest to vent, and the location nobody regrets from a construction point of view. From a living point of view, every load becomes a stair trip. On a Burnaby custom home with a basement suite, the basement is also the suite's floor, which raises the question of whose laundry it is. We put the family laundry in the basement only when the plan has no room for it upstairs, or when the owners tell us the basement is where they will spend their evenings anyway.

There is a fourth option on the three storey homes we build on sloped lots in Capitol Hill and in Coquitlam: two laundries. One upstairs for the bedrooms, one in the mudroom or the suite. It costs a second drain, a second vent and a second set of machines. For a household with two working parents and three children, the stairs it saves are worth that cost.

Build an upstairs laundry like a wet room

A washing machine holds a lot of water and sits on two rubber supply hoses under constant pressure. Above a finished living room, that is a risk you plan for.

Three things go into every upper-floor laundry we build. A drain pan under the washer, piped to a drain rather than left as a tray that overflows. A floor drain in the room, with the floor sloped to it, so a failed hose empties into the plumbing instead of the ceiling below. And a water shutoff you can reach without pulling the machine out, ideally a lever valve in a recessed box on the wall above the machines, or an automatic shutoff tied to a leak sensor on the floor.

The BC Building Code and the BC Plumbing Code govern how that floor drain, the washer standpipe and its trap and vent tie into the house drainage, and the plumber sizes and vents them under those rules at rough-in. The floor drain itself is our decision, made on every upper-floor laundry we build, because we have seen what a second-floor hose failure does to a kitchen ceiling.

The floor itself matters. Tile or sheet vinyl over a waterproof membrane, never a wood floor that continues in from the hall. And the joists under the machines get solid blocking so a front-loading washer on spin does not vibrate the whole floor.

Dryer venting, or no dryer venting

A conventional dryer pushes hot, wet, lint-filled air out of the house, and the BC Building Code is specific about where that air goes. Section 9.32.3 of the Part 9 ventilation rules requires exhaust ducts connected to clothes-drying equipment to discharge directly to the outdoors, through rigid or flexible metal duct with a backdraft damper and no lint trap in the duct. No venting into the attic, no venting into the garage, no plastic duct.

On a basement or mudroom laundry that is a short run through the rim joist. On an upstairs laundry it means the room needs a path to an exterior wall, and that path has to be planned before the framing is done. A dryer duct that runs across a ceiling for eight metres with four elbows collects lint that nobody can reach, and lint in a duct is a fire risk. We place upstairs laundries against an exterior wall wherever the plan allows, and we make the duct run short, straight and accessible for cleaning.

The alternative is to skip the duct. Natural Resources Canada describes ventless dryers as a closed-loop system with an internal condenser that removes the evaporated moisture to a drain, and heat-pump dryers recirculate warm air rather than exhausting it, which is why every heat-pump dryer meets the ENERGY STAR Most Efficient criteria. For an upstairs laundry in the middle of the plan, with no exterior wall in reach, a heat-pump dryer removes the venting problem entirely. It needs a drain for the condensate and it runs longer cycles. NRCan puts its energy savings at 20 to 60 percent beyond a standard model, which matters on an all-electric Burnaby home where every appliance shares one panel.

We ask the appliance question before the plumbing rough-in, because a heat-pump dryer wants a drain where a vented dryer wants a hole in the wall, and both are framing decisions.

The laundry is the one room where a plumbing decision, a venting decision and a sound decision all land on the same wall. Get it drawn before the stairs are.

Icon Projects Team

Keep the spin cycle out of the bedrooms

An upstairs laundry next to the primary bedroom is a good idea until the first 6 am load. The fix is in the framing, and it is the same detailing we use on a media room wall.

Insulate the wall shared with any bedroom. Hang the drywall on that wall on resilient channel, which decouples the drywall from the studs so vibration does not travel through. Put the door on the hallway, never directly off the bedroom. And keep the machines off the wall that backs onto the bed. Blocking under the machines, mentioned above, cuts the low-frequency rumble that insulation alone does not stop.

Burnaby's own secondary suite guide shows how seriously the City takes sound between living units: walls and ceilings between a suite and the main house need sound insulation with resilient channel, or a rated sound assembly. We borrow that standard for the laundry wall inside the family's own home, because a washer at full spin is louder than most neighbours.

Folding, hanging, and a sink

The machines take up the least space in a good laundry room. The rest is counter, rod, sink and cabinet, and every one of them is cheaper to frame in than to add later.

A counter across the top of front-loading machines, or beside a stacked pair, wide enough to fold one full load flat. A hanging rod at least the width of the washer, at a height where a long dress clears the counter. A deep sink for soaking and for the things that cannot go in a machine. Upper cabinets for detergent and the vacuum. A pull-out hamper or two so sorting happens in the room, not on the bedroom floor.

The photo on this post is the laundry off the mudroom in one of our West Abbotsford homes: side-by-side machines under a stone counter, uppers above, a tile backsplash that wipes clean, and the bench and hooks of the mudroom on the opposite wall. That is what a working laundry looks like when it gets designed instead of leftover.

A second laundry for the suite

If the house has a secondary suite, give the suite its own washer and dryer. Burnaby's guide does not require it, and the City's definition of a suite is about a self-contained unit with its own entrance and cooking facilities. But a shared laundry means either the tenant walking through the family's house or the owner walking into the tenant's, and we have never seen that arrangement last more than a year without friction.

Two details follow from that. The suite's machines go on the suite's own plumbing wall, ideally stacked against the bathroom stack so the drain and vent are shared. And the dryer duct and any drain line stay on the suite side of the fire separation. Burnaby's guide sets a rated fire separation between the suite and the main house and limits how drain, waste and vent piping can cross it, so a laundry that straddles the line creates a detailing problem you do not want at the frame inspection.

Draw the suite laundry in on the first plan, with its dryer route to the outdoors, and it costs a stacked closet's worth of space. Add it after the stack is poured and it costs a jackhammer.

The laundry room is the smallest wet room in the house and the one that gets used the most. It deserves the same twenty minutes at the drawing table that the ensuite gets, and on our Burnaby homes it gets them before the stairs are located, because by then the drain stack has already picked a wall.

Frequently asked questions

Should the laundry room be upstairs or downstairs in a Burnaby custom home?

For most families, upstairs, on the same floor as the bedrooms and the walk-in closets, because that is where clothes come off and go back. The trade-off is that an upper-floor laundry has to be built like a wet room, with a floor drain, a drain pan under the washer and a water shutoff within reach. At Icon Projects we put the laundry upstairs on most two and three storey Burnaby homes and treat the mudroom and basement as second-choice locations with their own strengths.

Does a laundry room need a floor drain in BC?

Treat it as a design decision, and on any laundry above a finished space the answer is yes. We install a floor drain with the floor sloped to it and a pan under the washer that drains to it, because a burst supply hose on a second floor floods the rooms below. The plumber sizes and vents the drain, the washer standpipe and its trap under the BC Plumbing Code at rough-in, and the City's plumbing inspector checks them before the framing is closed.

Can a clothes dryer vent into the attic or garage in a Burnaby house?

No. Section 9.32.3 of the BC Building Code requires exhaust ducts connected to clothes-drying equipment to discharge directly to the outdoors, and the duct has to be rigid or flexible metal with a backdraft damper and no lint trap. On an upstairs laundry we plan the shortest route to an exterior wall before framing so the duct run stays short and accessible.

Do heat-pump dryers need a vent?

No. Natural Resources Canada describes ventless dryers as a closed-loop system with an internal condenser that removes the evaporated moisture to a drain, and heat-pump dryers recirculate warm air rather than blowing it outside. That frees the laundry room from needing an exterior wall, at the cost of longer cycles. At Icon Projects we still rough in a drain for the condensate and confirm the appliance choice before the plumbing rough-in.

How do you stop laundry noise from reaching the bedrooms in a custom home?

Insulate the shared wall, hang the drywall on that wall on resilient channel, and put the machines on a solid, level, well-blocked floor so vibration has nothing to shake. Keep the washer off the wall that backs onto the primary bedroom and put the door on a hallway rather than the bedroom itself. At Icon Projects we detail the laundry wall the same way we detail a media room wall, at framing, because there is no fixing it after drywall.

Should a secondary suite in Burnaby have its own laundry?

Yes, in our view, even though the City's secondary suite guide does not require it. A shared laundry means the tenant walking through the main house or the owner walking into the suite, and neither works for long. Burnaby's guide does require sound insulation and a rated fire separation between the suite and the principal dwelling, and any laundry pipe or dryer duct that crosses that separation has to respect it, so plan the suite's machines inside the suite from the first drawings.

How much counter and hanging space does a laundry room need?

Enough to fold one full load flat and hang a load of shirts without the hangers touching the wall. On a Burnaby custom home that usually means a counter across the top of front-loading machines or beside a stacked pair, a hanging rod at least the width of the washer, and a sink deep enough to soak a sweater. Upper cabinets keep detergent off the counter. Every one of those items is cheaper to frame in than to add later.

Where should the laundry go on a three storey Burnaby home with a basement suite?

The family laundry goes on the bedroom floor and the suite's laundry stays inside the suite, ideally stacked against the suite's own plumbing wall. Plan the family laundry above or beside a bathroom so it shares a drain stack, and keep the suite's laundry on the suite side of the fire separation with its own dryer route to the outdoors. At Icon Projects we lock both locations before the plumbing rough-in because the drain stacks cannot move after that.