Would I do it again? (Laundry chute)

So every so often I like to update you on projects that I’ve done/purchases I’ve made to let you know how they’ve held up and if I like them as much as I thought I would. I’m always curious to hear that so I like to share in case you are wondering too.

I will say…I think and research and plan things to DEATH, so it’s rare that I regret doing anything. This one I’m still not sure about. :)

I shared our completed powder room a couple months ago and I’m so happy with how it turned out:

We have a huge powder room, right? It’s big as far as powder rooms go. We could have made it a full bathroom (it’s near my office which could have been another bedroom), but we went with the half. Anyway, I’m so glad we have a linen closet in this room.

What you didn’t see at that reveal, and many of you have already seen, was the big honkin’ tube inside the closet:

That is something I dreamed about for years and was SO thrilled to get installed. By now you’ve probably read the title of this post and deduced that this is our laundry chute. Smarty. ;) (You can see more about it here.)

What you didn’t see was the horrible, no good, did I mention horrible paint job I started last year. Originally I was going for red walls in this room and thought it may be fun to add a touch of red to the shelves (they needed to be painted anyway):

Ugh. I know. I mean, the photo is horrible but seriously…I KNOW. It was horrible. This one goes in the what was I thinking column.

I was going for white walls and bright red shelves, but somewhere along the way I got lazy and didn’t tape off (WHY?) so the paint got on the walls. And the PVC was always ugly -- initially I tried to get the lettering off the pipe using a method a reader mentioned, but it didn’t work for me. Then I thought, I’ll just paint it! Red! Like the rest of the closet! Brilliant!

Well red doesn’t cover well. Your tip of the day. So I stopped.

Anyway, I fixed it – more on that in a minute.

First up, the main purpose of this post. Would I do the laundry chute again? I’ve thought a lot about this lately and actually, I probably wouldn’t.

There’s a few reasons for this. The biggest – I never do laundry. I just…don’t. My husband does his own and I wait until I am out of clothes to wash my own. I will dig to the bottom of a drawer to find an odd sock before I will do laundry. It’s just my thing. I don’t hate laundry like I used to now that we have an actual laundry room, but I just don’t do it.

It’s my thing.

BUT. Because I don’t do it often, I wait till I can’t wait anymore and then I spend a day washing clothes, so in those instances it is nice to be able to just drop the clothes down the chute. Thing is, you still have to take the basket down to carry them back up when they’re done. So if I’m doing one load here or there I just take the clothes down in the basket because I’m going to have to bring them up in it anyway.

All that being said…our closet is a major disaster right now so I’m on a laundry binge. It’s laundry all the time – and I’ve been using the chute a ton.

Perhaps if we had more kids and more clothes I would use it more? Maybe someday when I’m totally and completely organized (snort) and I keep up with washing the clothes I will find it more helpful.

But for now…I walk the clothes down the stairs as much as I throw them down. I gotta say though – it’s fun. There is pure joy that happens when you throw the clothes down and hear them thump into the laundry basket. It kind of rocks. ;)

So…the chute is staying. Which brings me back to the hideous red linen closet. I finally painted it. The powder room was next on my decluttering rampage and like usual I couldn’t pass up this little DIY that needed to happen.

I used some paint I already had – it was a color called Billowing Clouds that I originally used to paint the powder room years ago. I didn’t want to spend a ton of time on this so I painted the walls and the shelves both the blue color:

Oh, I did prime first that red first, just one coat. Since I was painting the walls it took no time at all. I was able to prime, paint and organize the stuff in here in a couple hours. I’ve put this off for a year, and it took less than two hours. Story of my life!

You may notice the polka dots. ;) Yes, I covered the tube. YES…I obviously have no life. It was just so ugly. I went through a few options in my head for covering it and then remembered I had some contact paper. AND it matched the new paint. It’s like it was meant to be!:

See, I kind of have a life – I didn’t do the bottom part. Honestly it took about 15 minutes to cover it – and the dots make me smile when I open this door. :) I want to get some sticky tiles to put on the floor in there (I didn’t have the hardwoods put in the closet since the cuts would have been so tricky and added to the cost.)

By the way, a few readers wondered if that little bend in the pipe would keep things from going down and it doesn’t at all. Nothing has gotten stuck – even bulky towels and sheets because it’s so slick inside. So as far as laundry chutes go, this is a good one!

After decluttering the stuff in the bins in here I was able to get rid of one (that is a great feeling!). So even though we have half the space in here that we used to, everything still fits great:

And it’s pretty cute, seriously. I say even though other people won’t see a space, if you have to look at it every day it’s your prerogative to make it cute. :)

SO. Overall I do like having the laundry chute, but if I could do it again I would have waited longer before installing it. I think I would have decided that we really didn’t need it after all.

Have you ever done something in your house you are iffy about? Regret any renovations or decisions you made? I don’t know if I regret this one really, I just would have waited to see how things functioned without it.