Chutes and Ladders

Monday morning, Tuesday morning... I've continued ticking off the steps of my new routine before I leave the house each morning. Both days put together didn't take me as long as the chores took me on Day One. Though that shouldn't be a surprise. I cleared away quite a bit of clean laundry and odds and ends that didn't belong in my bedroom that first morning. My bedroom's a comfy place for reading, talking on the phone, watching TV, and surfing the net, so it's easy for this room to become cluttered up quickly.

Here again, a well-trained family can help with the care. If each one carries soiled clothing to the hamper or clothes-chute... the sum total of saved time really amounts to something for the homemaker or servant.

Oh, if only I had a clothes-chute - and a servant at the other end of it! Wouldn't it be marvelous just to slide those dirty clothes right out of view and not even see them again until they were folded up all neatly in a fresh, clean stack... I don't even own a hamper, just two plastic laundry baskets. I keep them stacked up at the back of my closet and store my dirty clothes there until my next trip to the laundry room. Unless I'm being a clothes hog, they do a pretty good job of containing a week's worth of laundry. It'd be nice to own a hamper again and keep the dirty clothes a little more out of sight. From time to time, I've seen a hamper in vintage advertisements. They generally seem smaller than the new ones out there on the market today.

A clothes-chute reminds me of all the other "chutes" into and out of the early 20th-century home. The coal man shoveled coal right into your cellar through a chute. The milk man left his daily delivery in the milk chute built near the back door... Isn't it fitting that the same homes featured a chute leading straight from bathroom to laundry room? The people of that era really had a thing for the idea that you should be able to slide all life's necessities from one location to the next. Like the home was a miniature factory and its chutes, the assembly line.

Here's a description of the kind of clothes-chute you would probably have found in a '40s home:

"In many residences a clothes-chute is provided, which runs from some place in the second story, from the bathroom when practicable, to the laundry. The chute is merely a vertical shaft or well about 16 inches by 2 feet inside, lined with matching ceiling and provided with doors in each story." Frank Eugene Kidder and Thomas Kidder, Building Construction and Superintendence (W. T. Comstock, 1915)