Laundry Room

Facing the barrel of a sawed-off shotgun on a dark West Baltimore street, Roland Scott fought back. He pulled out his own weapon - a fake handgun - and wrested the shotgun away from his attacker, city police said. Scott ordered the man to strip naked in the middle of Laurens Street, took $800 from him and forced him to march into the laundry room of a nearby apartment building. "He starts beating him, telling him to get more money, saying, `Get me a cell phone or I'm going to kill you,'" said Sgt. Dennis M. Raftery Jr., a supervisor in the Police Department's homicide unit.

"I think the house fits into the woods perfectly," Yvonne Kovacic said of her family's contemporary home tucked into a treed slope in Highland. The natural cedar-plank exterior and unpainted decks blend with the trees. The soaring walls of windows and multiple decks use the serene setting to advantage, with views all around. Even straight up through the skylights in the high ceilings, said her husband, Nick. The couple wants to find a smaller house, as their children are grown. "We've been here for 20 years," she said.

A grand foyer with a 38-foot entrance hall, rooms with 12-foot-high ceilings and deep, detailed moldings mark this stately Guilford home. "It's great for hanging art," said Tony O'Brien, who has lived there with his wife and their two children for nearly three years. Soaring windows, including a dramatic bank of leaded glass windows at the staircase's marble landing, allow the sun to illuminate the house and warm its wood floors. A front veranda greets visitors, a sunroom with a half-moon window lies off the 34-foot-long living room and in the back, huge trees and landscaping seclude the stone patio.

From this home in a residential oasis in downtown Annapolis, every window offers a view - whether a slice of the city and its waterfront, or a peek at a serene garden. "You can see the capitol, the steeples, the cityscape, and it's so open with the big windows," said Gary Richardson who, with his wife, Mary, owns the house overlooking Spa Creek. Eleven-foot ceilings on the first and second floors add to a sense of openness in the house, which is a short walk from the business district, but seems a world apart from its daytime bustle and nightlife.

Nancy Smith of Bloomfield Hills, Mich., sometimes shut her eyes to the mess as she passed through the long hallway that connected her garage to her kitchen. It was there that the items of daily activities piled up -- golf and tennis shoes, rackets, jackets, baseball mitts and backpacks. To cleanse the clutter, Smith recently renovated the space into a mudroom -- an upgrade that more new homes feature and one that can add value to existing residences. "We wanted something so the kids could come in the back door and plop their stuff down rather than drag it through the rest of the house," Smith said.

A 42-year-old man wanted in the August sexual assault of a 14-year-old girl in the laundry room of an Ellicott City apartment complex was arrested in North Carolina, Howard County police said yesterday. Members of a U.S. Marshals fugitive task force arrested Fermin Mejia, formerly of the 3200 block of Normandy Woods Drive, on Tuesday at a friend's house in Marsh, N.C. He was being held in the Wake County (N.C.) Public Safety Center on a $500,000 cash bond and is fighting extradition to Maryland, according to Howard County police.

Howard County police were searching yesterday for a Ellicott City man charged in the attempted rape last week of a 14-year-old girl in the laundry room of an apartment complex in the 3000 block of Oak Green Circle in Ellicott City. Fermin Aseituno Mejia, 42, of the 3200 block of Normandy Woods Drive has been charged with attempted second-degree rape, third- and fourth-degree sex offense, second-degree assault and indecent exposure. Police said the girl was walking to her family's apartment at 2:15 p.m. Aug. 22 when Mejia grabbed her and pushed her into a laundry room, where he fondled and sexually assaulted her. The victim escaped and reported the incident to her mother, who contacted police.

Debbie Schwartz has given her upstairs laundry room the star treatment. Her super-capacity washer and dryer sit on marble floors and bask in the light of twin bronze chandeliers. A Romanesque sculpture stands on one of the wide, polished marble counters designed for folding laundry. The large room has the same cabinets as her gourmet kitchen, as well as a tile stall to dry delicates. There's even a garden view. It's a workroom, yes, but, by making it elegant, the chore feels less like drudgery.

I HAD A QUICK answer this week for my kids' question of what I want for Father's Day. This year I want their backs. I told my two, twentysomething sons, one home for the summer and one visiting for the weekend, that I wanted them to hang around the house long enough on Father's Day, tomorrow, to haul some heavy, old cabinets out of the basement. This gift of sweat is different from presents of previous years such as books and polo shirts. But the shift from sentiment to muscle has been gradual.

In Baltimore City Navy hospital ship to depart today for duty in Indian Ocean Several hundred crewmembers boarded the Navy hospital ship USNS Comfort yesterday afternoon, bidding goodbye to family members and friends as they prepared to aid in a possible war in Iraq. The 1,000-bed ship -- last deployed for war during Desert Storm in 1990 and 1991 -- was set to sail at 9 a.m. today. It has been readying for duty at the Indian Ocean island of Diego Garcia as part of a broad mobilization of air, land and sea forces for a possible invasion of Iraq.