We don’t fold our laundry on food prep surfaces 
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When I lived in an apartment in New York, it had a washer and dryer in the kitchen. I actually liked it because it was a small kitchen and the washer and dryer provided additional counter space : )
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And heat in cold weather. 
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Looks great. I 'd try and get a shot from across the other side of the canal showing the canal and the house.
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I literally just took my dishawasher out of the kitchen as I haven’t used it for ten years. I replaced it with a washer/dryer. Having lived in UK I don’t think it at all strange but it attracts comments from Australian visitors. They go “how very European”. Better than leaving your laundry in the basement laundry where all the other tenants go through your smalls, like in US. I will add it to my list of “Things People Are Surprised To Discover Are Done Differently In Other Countries”. Like light switches, electricity outlets, bedroom doors, kettles, quilts/duvets/doonas, and, of course, toilets.
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It isn’t “like in the US”. Basements are very uncommon in the US save for only a few (and very small) states. I’ve lived (all over)in the US for most of my life and the house I have now is the first one that’s ever had a basement. And, yes, the washer and dryer is down there but it seems aberrant, not normal or typical. I mean, it’s basically a dungeon, isn’t it? The Puritans loved them some dungeons. It’s a weird part of the country, I can tell you that for free 
Besides, who are we kidding, most men’s underwear is not usually “small” (though I’ve known one or two in my time 
) and women aren’t putting their “small” ones in the washer. The-smaller-they-are-the-more-they cost so those never go down to the washer, they get hand-washed upstairs in a sink.
More importantly, what do you mean by,
?
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In the winter on my Airbnb listing (UK) which has a woodburner…my main picture is the fire with a couple of pairs of legs propped up in front of it with mugs of hot chocolate on a table ….it works….
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Really? Every house we lived in when I was growing up had a basement. That’s where everyone went during the tornado warnings in Kansas. And they weren’t dungeons at all. One summer when I was about 14, my best friend and I entrepreneurially painted up a bunch of second hand furniture, and created a little daycare for the neighborhood kids in my basement. That was our summer job.
If basements are rare in the US, how come there’s so many Airbnb basement apartments?
My underwear is quite small and I always throw it in the washing machine.
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From 2015 Washington Post [article gifted: https://wapo.st/3IRb5R9]:
There are about 133 million housing units in the United States, not all of them occupied, according to the Census Bureau. About two-thirds of those are 1-unit buildings – standalone houses. About 42 percent of those standalone houses have basements, either full (32 percent of the total) or partial (9.8 percent).
To @JJD’s point:
Source: Where Are Basements Common? - Love Home Designs
The above article is fun to read.
I grew up in the Chicago area (not part of Tornado Alley) and everyone I knew had a basement there.
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None of the houses we lived in when I was growing up had a basement. And we lived in 18 different houses in 3 different regions of the country by the time I graduated from high school. I’ve since lived in another 15 houses in an additional 3 regions of the country as an adult and have never had a basement. (I only happen to know these numbers because of a writing project I’m doing).
Nonetheless, I realized it was only my personal experience so I googled it before I posted that basements aren’t common in the US. You can google “are basements common in the US”. Funny actually, I thought of you because Kansas was mentioned many times in different articles, sometimes as having the most basements or something like that.
However, I’ll admit that I did not do even the most perfunctory of research regarding how panties are usually washed. I was just being cheeky about that (pun intended) 
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We lived in a couple of places that were in tornado alley in Texas, in the panhandle and also in northern West Texas. I never saw a basement there but it was very common to have a cellar out in the yard. That’s where we sheltered for tornados there. Although at one house we lived in, the cellar was way out at the back of the yard. It was too far to run to one time when the alarms went off so my parents put me and the dog in the bathtub and threw a mattress over us It worked though. We were okay.
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If it was an air mattress maybe you were imprinted and your interest in Airbnb started there!
I was referring to apartment buildings but given I have only lived in Boston and Hoboken maybe basement laundries are rarer than we are lead to expect from US sitcoms. In US bedroom doors usually open so you can see the bed straight away. In UK they open the opposite way, so you can’t see the bed. And don’t get me started on the racetrack theory of supermarkets. Okay since you asked. In countries where people drive of the left (Australia, NZ, Japan, Ireland, South Africa, India, Pakistan) when you go into a supermarket the fruit & vegetables are on the left and shoppers go that way first and continue in a clockwise direction. In ones where you drive on the right (Americas and Europe, pretty much everywhere else) the fruit&veg is on the right and you go in an anticlockwise direction. This isn’t always the case, I recently went into an Aldi for the first time and the fruit & veg was on the right but that is Aldi for you.
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Growing up in coastal Virginia, I never even saw a basement till we went to Baltimore and stayed with friends of my parents that had a really nice finished basement.
I rented 2 basement apartments in Seattle, of all places, that often had very wet basements, but not mine. Actually there were quite a few basements in Seattle, there were a few I remodeled as a contractor.
My house here has a basement, but wouldn’t want to live in it, totally unrefined. Depends on where you are in the country as to where you’ll find basements.
Since we are sharing our personal experiences here…
Two of the homes I lived in between 1964 and 1990 had the washer in the kitchen. One of them is my brother in law’s house and the washer is still in the kitchen. The dryer is in a utility room in another part of the house. At least here in El Paso it was quite common to put the washer in the kitchen in the 1950’s. I don’t know how many homes have never moved them out but I’ve been in at least one friend’s granny’s home that still had it in the kitchen.
The only homes with basements in El Paso are at least 80 years old. Homes are built on slab foundations here.
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Lots of comments about the location of the washer and dryer. I don’t know your situation, but sometimes the washer placement is the convenient one for an inexpensive plumbing connection. I would rather find one in the bedroom than not have one.
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Certainly if you are putting in a water-using appliance that wasn’t planned for when a house was built, there are considerations re hooking into existing plumbing.
However, if you are building from scratch or doing major renos, as my plumber said, you can have things anywhere you want- it just requires more plumbing pipe, which is relatively inexpensive.
I’m sorry, I’m not sure I understand about seeing the bed. Are you talking about the placement of the bed? I’ve always been told not to place the bed in such a way that your feet are pointing straight out the doorway. Something about it being the position of the dying or dead or something (a superstition I suppose).
As far as I’ve ever noticed the bedroom doors here usually open into a bedroom as opposed to opening out of the bedroom and into a hallway or other walking space. I believe it’s so that the hallway or other walking space isn’t blocked by doors sticking out from bedrooms and/or that it’s better to lose a bit of floor space in a bedroom than in another space. But I’m not sure how it fits in with seeing the bed or not.
Do your bedroom doors open out into the hall? (I’ve spent some time down there but I guess I didn’t notice the doors). I keep picturing both scenarios in my head but can’t figure out in which situation I see the bed first or not. I think it depends on where I’m standing when I open the door! Sorry, I’m surely bungling it up.
This is fascinating! However, unfortunately, I think it’s probably born of coincidences. In thinking about where the fruit&veg is located in the markets in my current location as well as markets that I remember well from places I’ve lived in the past, I’d say it’s about 50/50. About half of them have fruit&veg on the left and the other half have it on the right. There is no pattern even within markets of the same brand. And most of them have more than one entry door and it’s the door of entry that seems to dictate the direction of shopping (it is for me anyway and as it’s so very annoying to walk across the store through the lines at the registers, I can’t imagine I’m the only one).
The one exception that came up in thinking about it is Trader Joes. Of the many I can remember, almost all of them have the wine&beer on the left. Priorities I guess,
We have two Aldis. The fruit&veg is on the left in one of them and on the right in the other. One of them only has one entry door and it’s placed as such that you enter in the middle of the store through an aisle of chips and cookies, which has always stood out as strange to me.
However, to your point, I have noticed that people walk on sidewalks related to the side of the road on which they drive. I figured this out the hard way one afternoon in downtown Sydney.
After getting knocked around repeatedly by other pedestrians, for way too long, I thought, well this is either the clumsiest and most aggressive culture in the entire world or perhaps I am walking in the wrong direction on this side of the sidewalk.
Huh? No, it depends on the size and configuration of the room as to whether you can see the bed through the open door or not. In a large bedroom, where there is flexibility as to where to place the bed, one might choose to position the bed so that it couldn’t be seen from the open door. I’ve never heard of house designers or construction contractors basing the direction the door opens with consideration as to bed placement.
And whether the fruit and veggie section of a supermarket is on the right or the left isn’t determined by the store being in the Americas. I could list an equal amount of lefts or rights in all the stores I have shopped at in various places I have lived or travelled in the US and Canada.
The doors usually open into the space not outside or into a hall. It’s for security of the hinges and to prevent a door from being blocked from opening from the outside.
Edit: I was just checking on this because I was told this by a contractor. Apparently in hurricane prone areas doors will open to the outside. So regional differences. And commercial buildings have different codes. My classroom door opened out and when talking to students about active shooters I’d say we could barricade the door. They pointed out that the door opened out, not in. I still argued that piling stuff in front of the door was better than nothing.
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