I hate my laundry room. Here’s why:
When we built our house three years ago, I really had no
sense for how much laundry a middle schooler, a high school athlete and a coach could generate. On a light
weekend, I do about 12 loads of laundry. Due to the room being small, the laundry task generates Himalayan piles of
dirty laundry on the floor of the master bedroom and baskets of clean laundry
that no one ever wants to fold and put away that dot the rooms in our house
like those large round bails you see in farm fields.
Then, there are the shoes. Yes, I’m grateful everyone has been
trained in the “take your shoes off” practice when they come in the house. But
of the four of us, I have the smallest feet in the family. Take four people,
times three – the average number of pairs per person that are on the floor of
the laundry room – and you have a minefield of sizes 9, 10 and 13 that even the
most savvy of burglars couldn’t get through without a fight.
(Interesting side note – I had an ADT (home security)
salesperson call once to ask if I would be interested in a quote. I told him
about the shoes that gather at all of the entrances to our house and suggested
that maybe the company would want to do a little R&D on low-cost systems
by visiting our house. He showed more sense than you would think a person who
agreed to try to sell home security systems to rural Iowans would have by
politely declining.)
Anyway, both the laundry and the shoes tend to turn my
tropical storm mom personality into a full-fledged hurricane. I hate the mess.
What I hate worse is the mess I become when I try to encourage my family to
clean it up. They developed ways to tune “hurricane mom” out a long time ago –
can’t say I blame them.
Today we have the rarest of all Saturdays when we really
don’t have anything going on. I need to de-Christmas the house, but that’s
about it. So I pulled Pat into the laundry room to engage his problem-solving
skills (summa cum laude and all that).
After contemplating the scene, he asked, “What if we built shelves?”
I countered, “How would that help the laundry piles and the shoes?”
He agreed I had a point and then suggested that everyone
could put their shoes on the shelves. Or maybe in a bin. Then he winced a
little. Poor guy. He said he would put some additional thought into it and went
to sit on the couch and watch ESPN. That’s where he does his best thinking.
So me, being no slouch in the problem-solving department
myself (despite my lack of academic honors), came up with my own brainstorm: I consulted Pinterest.
People, you would not believe the vast idea haven for laundry
room storage, layout and décor that awaits you in the land of Pinterest. They
range from the well-intended, but a little misguided:
To the borderline genius:
And, no kidding – they even have a few solutions starring our friend, the Mason jar.
I’m off to do laundry and redistribute shoes while I
contemplate options. Happy Saturday.
No comments:
Post a Comment