Last Thursday afternoon the clouds that had been sitting over Orangeburg all week finally opened, and the load of towels I had pinned to the line came back in wetter than it went out. I stood in the back hall holding a dripping armful, with nowhere to put it, and finally admitted that the laundry setup in this house needed some thought.
Like a lot of ranch houses from the late fifties, ours wasn't built with a laundry room. The washer and dryer sit side by side in a closet with bifold doors in the narrow back hall, the one you walk through from the carport door to the kitchen. The closet holds the machines and nothing else. There's no counter, no sink, no shelf. For four years, everything else about laundry happened on our bed, the couch, or the kitchen table.
Next to the closet, though, there is a little stretch of wall about two feet wide before the hall turns the corner. With the floor space in front of it, that's roughly five square feet. It turned out to be enough.
What the corner needed to do
Before buying anything, I wrote down what actually happens to our laundry. It came down to four jobs:
- Collect and sort dirty clothes, so I'm not sorting on the floor every time.
- Hold supplies within reach of the machines.
- Air-dry the things that can't go in the dryer, and the overflow on rainy days.
- Stage clean clothes until they get folded and put away.
Folding still happens on our bed. I tried to make room for it in the hall and there just isn't any, and I'd rather admit that than cram in a fold-down table that blocks the path to the kitchen.
What's there now
A slim rolling cart for sorting
Instead of three hampers spread across the house, a narrow three-tier rolling cart now sits against the wall. Top basket for darks, middle for lights, bottom for towels and sheets. It's about ten inches wide, so it tucks beside the closet without sticking out into the hall. When a basket is full, that's a load. Lila, who is in first grade and learning to sort just about everything, can drop her clothes in the right tier, most days.
A shelf above the machines
Ben put up one sturdy wooden shelf inside the closet, above the washer and dryer, using brackets and a board left over in the shed. Detergent, stain spray, wool dryer balls and a jar for the coins and hair ties that turn up in pockets all live there now. It's the one thing I wish we had done four years ago.
A wall-mounted drying rack
This was the real fix for rainy days. It's an accordion-style wooden rack screwed into the wall above the cart. Folded, it sticks out about three inches. Pulled open, it holds a full load of shirts or a set of sheets folded over the rungs. In September, with the humidity still high, things dry slower inside than I'd like, so I aim the hall ceiling fan's breeze toward it and they're usually done overnight.
Hooks for hanging things
Three hooks along the side of the closet frame hold hangers straight from the dryer, so Ben's work shirts don't sit in a wrinkled pile. One more hook holds a small mesh bag for socks waiting to find their partners. There are always socks waiting.
What it cost
| Item | Cost |
|---|---|
| Slim rolling cart | $32 |
| Wall-mounted drying rack | $38 |
| Shelf brackets (board from the shed) | $14 |
| Four hooks | $9 |
| Mesh sock bag | $4 |
| Total | $97 |
The habits that keep it working
The setup helped. The habits are what made it last.
- One load a day, most days, instead of a Sunday marathon. When a basket fills, it goes in the washer that evening.
- Clean clothes don't wait in the hall. When a load comes out, it goes straight to our bed to be folded before bedtime. Otherwise the corner becomes a second closet.
- The drying rack gets folded up every morning, so the hall stays a hall.
- The line outside is still first choice when the weather allows. Sun-dried sheets are one of the small luxuries of having a yard, even if, in the middle of hurricane season, the sky decides more often than I do.
It isn't a laundry room. It will never be on the cover of anything. But last night, when another afternoon storm rolled through right after I'd started the towels, I just pulled the rack down and hung them up, and didn't think about it again until morning. In a small house, that's what a good corner does.
