Laundry Chute
These days, it’s all the rage to put the washer/dryer near the bedrooms, which usually means an upper floor. From a modern convenience perspective, it makes a lot of sense. From a practical and environmental standpoint it’s a little more questionable.
Putting washing machines in the basement had a very practical reason: every once in a while, they leak. And when it’s on an upper floor, it can create an extraordinary mess. The environmental reason that we didn’t mind keeping the laundry away from the bedrooms is that we hang our laundry outside a good 90% of the time. So even if we’d put the laundry upstairs, we’d still be dragging the hamper full of wet clothes downstairs and outside. Or, given the convenience of everything on the upper floor, perhaps we’d use the dryer more.
Instead, Anne insisted we put in a laundry chute. It’s a fantastic solution to the dirty-clothes-in-the-bedroom problem and it eliminates half of the clothes lugging. Plus, it has the appeal of trap doors and hidden bedrooms: a laundry chute has such a wonderful retro feel that I approved of it on that basis alone.
Once we made sure to have the master bedroom straight above the basement laundry room, we discovered another bonus: the chute goes right by our first floor mudroom, so that when we come back from skiing and you want to unload your smelly socks, you can just dump them into the chute and off they go.
Another unexpected benefit was that the 2′ x 2′ opening that we left for the chute proved to be the perfect chase for our ERV ducts, our solar hot water piping, and the conduit for the wires we ran for our future photovoltaics – all the stuff that runs from the basement up to the attic. In the end, our laundry chute was about about 22′ wide by 18″ deep. Some photos:
the laundry chute opening in the upstairs master bathroom
the laundry chute in the mudroom
in the laundry room in the basement, the chute will empty into a hamper
