Laundry chair? More like laundry table, bench, floor...
I did appreciate this bit in WaPo absolving me of all blame for the piles of clean, unsorted laundry I leave lying around the house.
Many people call it the laundry chair. But it’s not always a chair that serves as a repository for the heap of clothes in laundry limbo. It might be a futon, or an ottoman, or the top of a dresser, or an exercise bike being put to a different kind of workout. If it has a surface area fit for plopping, it will do.
Anecdotal evidence indicates that most of us have some kind of clothes chair, perhaps most famously Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.). The specifics of the pile — its size, the stage of cleanliness — vary, but we need some kind of in-between space, and that’s what the laundry chair gives us. It’s time to embrace it.
What I find unbelievable is that anyone is able to confine the clothesplosion to just one chair. I’ve got, like, half a dozen different ‘in-between spaces’ I can think of for the dumping of clean laundry. Indeed, I wish that when we renovated the house we’d told the architect to just create one vast hangar space with a suction tube running into it from the laundry.
The joy of living alone means that my laundry system both suits me and annoys no one but me.
I moved house last year and my new laundry has cupboards and a benchtop! This is where my clean sheets and towels end up when they get folded after drying. The towel/sheet system I've established means that as I put the load of sheets or towels into the washing machine, I collect the clean sheets or towels from the laundry bench to take them upstairs and deploy them. No need to make superfluous trips to put them in the linen cupboard, unless I have a rent inspection and I need to pretend that I'm a neat and tidy person 24/7.
My soiled clothes live in a Schrodinger's paradox of clean but can be worn again on the bathroom floor. Because I'm a knowledge worker who works from home full time, I will wear the same clothes several times in a week, so they get taken off and left on the bathroom floor to be worn again until the end of the week when they get gathered up to be washed. My clean clothes end up piled optimistically on my bed in the eternal hope that I will fold and put them away so I can go to sleep, but what actually happens is that they end up in a pile of clean clothes on the floor of my bedroom, only to be selected and worn as required, before they then migrate to the Shrodinger's pile on the bathroom floor.
I'm fully aware that neither of these systems would be tolerated if I were living with another adult, but this only serves as added incentive never to do that again.
Having typed all that out and revealed that as a 40 something professional I still appear to be living like a uni student, I think I now understand why Prof Boylan mistook me for a man all those years ago, despite all the evidence to the contrary 😬
I have 3.
My daughters bed, which she moves to the floor shortly there after.
A couch in the main bedroom, which my wife then distributes evenly around the room after she gets home from work or before work if she decides.
And my clothes folded, stacked neatly on a small telescope box in the front room.