You know when you finally resolve a small but lingering irritation in your home and it feels disproportionately thrilling? Like when organizing the utensil drawer or getting that rug to stop slipping feels almost as good as, say, painting a room or something that just seems like a much bigger deal? I love that. Sometimes it’s the smallest of tweaks that go the furthest toward making our homes the havens they should be. So I say the minor revolutions in our homes are to be celebrated!…Which is all a long way of introducing the very sexy topic of how I carry laundry.
Our washer and dryer are in the basement, but of course we generate 90% of our laundry two stories up where the bedrooms and bathroom are. This makes for a lot of laundry schlepping, especially since the laundry in this house has a certain Gremlin quality to it: I swear it multiplies when I’m not looking. That or some other supernatural force must be at play because there is no way four people continually generate as much laundry as we have piling up around here. There’s just no way. It must be Gremlins. Or Tribbles.
But my point is that I often need to carry laundry up or down two flights of stairs. Our hamper is awkward to carry, especially through two baby gates and with little people darting and weaving around.
The hamper does have a liner that’s intended to be removed for toting laundry, but the velcro that held it in place has fallen off so it just gets smooshed in the bottom of the hamper. Not helpful. It isn’t especially convenient to carry anyway.
The inconvenience meant that I used to put off carrying the laundry back upstairs for days. I’d just go down to the basement to pull out one or two clean items as needed. Ridiculous, I know (and hardly more convenient). But I have found a highly effective solution: Ikea bags.
Yes, these big blue shopping bags (that also seem to multiply around here) have changed my laundry life. What the bags lack in general attractiveness, they more than make up for in function. They are large enough to carry all the laundry I care to deal with at one time, and the long handles make it easy to throw the bag over one shoulder while leaving both hands free for such things as herding toddlers and steadying oneself while descending stairs. Bonus: the bag itself ads virtually no weight to the load, unlike our bulky hamper. They’re great for the return trip with clean laundry, too, because they have just enough structure to keep a couple stacks of neatly folded clothes, well, neat.
The bright blue bag is admittedly a bit of a feng shui destroyer, so I still use the hamper upstairs for looks. The bag just lives in a nearby drawer when not in use…which, honestly, is hardly ever…but it could theoretically be out of sight. If those darn Gremlins would leave us alone.