“I Didn’t Realize Until I Went to College that Not Every House Has a Second Floor Laundry Room.”

Sadly, those words actually came out of Erica’s mouth.  When I told her that I was adding a laundry chute, she got strangely excited and informed me that she had never lived somewhere with a laundry chute.  Then the girl who has never lived in a house more than ten years old uttered the infamous line heading this post.

I don’t mind doing laundry.  In fact, there is something sort of systematic and therapeutic about it that I like.  My problem is getting my clothes to the laundry to begin with, as opposed to them ending up in an ever-growing radius around the laundry hamper in my room.  Adding a laundry chute to my house had the two-fold purpose of not only adding a minor amenity, but also cutting off one of my self-admitted worst habits at the source.  With a laundry chute in my room, my clothes have no excuse to go anywhere about down to the laundry room… not on my recliner, or all over the floor where they will inevitably get pushed under the bed and remain hidden for a month.  Hence, the reasons were adding a laundry chute were obvious, and so was the place to add it.

This 50’s house came with closets that were abnormally big.  In fact, the entire wall that the main bedroom shared with the living room was a closet running the length of this space.  It wasn’t long before we realized that this large closet in what would become the main bedroom was directly over the space in the basement that will be the laundry room.  Thus, the idea to add a laundry chute seemed obvious.

It took my dad what was probably a couple hours, and yet felt like 30 minutes, to cut a hole in closet floor, drop the sheet metal into place, and frame up the half wall it would be housed in.

For now, the chute just drops into the storage room in the basement that I’m converting into a laundry room.  Eventually, it would have some sort of framed in receptacle to catch clothes or hold a laundry basket, but for now it just drops into the place where washer and dryer will go.

Over the next few weeks, when my dad had some free minutes, he drywalled the half wall housing the laundry chute.  The end result: a built-in laundry chute directly from the main bedroom to the laundry room that took little to no useful closet space.

I never would have guessed that, as a 28 year old man, something as simple as a laundry chute would get me excited, but I have come to learn that when you’re in the midst of a year-long gutting and remodeling, you come to find satisfaction in extremely petty things.  Any sign of forward progress is fulfilling, and the laundry chute was one of them.

Now I just have to teach Erica how it works since she’s never had one….