The Great Laundry Rescue

One of the features of our house that I have been most excited about is the laundry shoot. The little door sits in the hallway between the bedrooms on the second floor, and the shaft drops the laundry down two stories to the middle of the basement (it lands in about the most inconvenient place you can imagine, which is maybe a blessing because it motivates me to pick up the laundry and put it in the washing machine every time I go to the basement).

I’ve written before about my laundry woes. I detest the chore in every way shape and form, but I also hate having to stare at baskets of dirty laundry stacked about nearly every room in the house waiting for me to carry them downstairs to wash, and that has been the case with my life, pretty much since I moved off to college. Sometimes in Wisconsin, when all three kids were wetting their beds every single night the laundry in their room would stack up as high as my waist. It was with joy that I observed the laundry shoot from the second floor to the basement when we looked at this house for the first time.

The laundry shoot has been working out terrific. Everyone is trained to open the door and drop in the dirty clothes, clothes that plummet down to the basement, out of sight until I go to the basement. However, Sunday morning, much before dawn, Ms. Crazy Preschooler had an accident. We took care of blankets and pajamas right away, and when the sun came up, I told her to drop all the soiled bedding down the laundry shoot. She did. Except that all the bedding was stuffed together in a clump, and when it was pushed into the little laundry shoot, it got stuck. I was unaware that it was stuck, so Mr. Perpetual Mess and I also stuffed our laundry into the shaft before I realized that it wasn’t actually plummetting to the cement far below with that satisfying plopping sound.

The laundry was packed in the shaft, somewhere between the first and second floors. I located a broom handle and tried pushing it down from above, but it was too far down to reach. I ran down to the basement with the broom handle, but it was far too far up the shaft to pull down from the bottom.

So, I thought about the situation for awhile, while attending to the basic needs of preschoolers. Then I came up with the brilliant idea of putting a mailing tube with a solid plastic end down the shoot from above so I could push on that with the broom stick. Ms. Crazy Preschooler held the flashlight while I stuffed the tube down. But when I got the broomstick in, the broomstick was too long to push on the tube. I needed to get the tube farther down the shaft so I could push with the broomstick, so I rummaged in my closet and pulled out my camera tripod. I stuffed that down the laundry shoot from above and pushed down the mailing tube, and then pushed on everything with the broom handle as far as I could push.

The laundry was still stuck.

I ran back down to the basement and tried to pull the laundry down with the broomstick, but I still couldn’t reach it from below. I thunked up the stairs to the first floor and got the step stool, which I put on top of the mountain of laundry on the basment floor. I climbed up and I could just barely reach the laundry with the broomstick. I scraped and scraped until finally I managed to pull out a few blankets, and then the mailing tube and tripod came crashing down, barely missing my head. Nothing broke, thankfully.

So, the lesson learned: No wadded up bedding in the laundry shoot. Isn’t it amazing how you can get yourself in a predicament in a snap and it takes forever to get out of the predicament?