JENAL Cloakroom - and next to the electrics room & airing cupboard

When designing your place to live-in from scratch, it's amazing just how self-analytical you become and how useful this process can be. The cloakroom positioning is a good example. We figured that the amount of space we need for our onboard clothing would be less than needed for our 'old' business lives. But... we may live & move in a variety of environments therefore these social & temperature changing environments would need variety in our attire.

Part of our master bedrooms built-in cupboard space would be consumed by the household sized (60 cm) washing-machine & beside it a similar sized tumble-dryer. Consequently, we would lose some of our clothes storage space. Incidentally, placing the clothes cleaning machines in the bedroom was part of this self-analytical process - we figured that most of our regular fabric cleaning needs are generated in the bedroom area so why transport them elsewhere on the barge for cleaning?

This loss of clothes storage space could be usefully and conveniently compensated for by placing all our outdoor clothing needs (coats, shoes, hats, etc.) near the main exit/entrance door and the closest convenient place was the large area under the spiral stairs.

STARBOARD SIDE

This open cloakroom area also has a drip-tray so wetted attire can drip without making a mess. Placing the cloakroom so, dictated a closed foot well to each stair tread to prevent it from coating... our... coats :-) Price and technology willing, we plan to have fibre-optic lighting in the stairwell stair treads.

Next to the cloakroom and against the starboard side, we have placed two more small rooms. The least accessed room of the two is the electrics room where all JENAL's electronics are housed but between this room and the open cloakroom is a closet where the domestic hot water tank (210ltr calorifier) resides and where slated wooden shelves allow us to air recently cleaned clothes.