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I have a chair in my bedroom that I use to lay out my clothing for the next day. Is it because I’m fancy? No. Well, I have been called “fancy,” but this pattern emerged because I don’t trust myself to do anything when the alarm goes off in the morning. Strictly rote tasks only in the AM: brush teeth, get dressed, walk/feed dog, COFFEE. But selecting which clothes to wear, that’s one decision too many. In the last couple years the chair has also become home to some of my pants, with pairs I’ve just worn going to the bottom of the pile. Some will say I’m just too lazy to put the pants away in a drawer or in the closet, I say I’m a creative bedroom landscape architect. And now I have The Washington Post to back me up! WaPo just ran a piece on the organizational benefits of having a laundry staging ground in the bedroom. Victory.
The laundry chair: Many people call it the laundry chair. But it’s not always a chair that serves as a repository for the heap of clothes in laundry limbo. It might be a futon, or an ottoman, or the top of a dresser, or an exercise bike being put to a different kind of workout. If it has a surface area fit for plopping, it will do.
A staging ground: Therein lies the genius of the laundry chair (or, as I call the bench in my bedroom, “clothes mountain”). No matter how many marital spats it may cause, it’s not actually a signal of chaos — it’s a way of creating order within the chaos. Psychologists and decor experts agree, pointing to the natural need for an intermediary place to put things that you haven’t quite categorized yet, or to use as a staging ground for what you might need in the near future. The pile can save you from overwashing items that don’t yet require laundering. Plus, there’s a comforting predictability to the cycle: As soon as you clear the heap, you’ve freed up space for the next collection of clothes to begin gathering.
Harmless, delusional thinking: Even folks who make a living beautifying homes espouse the virtues of the laundry chair. Christopher Boutlier, an interior designer in D.C., calls the laundry chair “absolutely unavoidable … It’s just this convenient spot for you to put something while you’re debating in your head what you’re gonna do with it.” … In the end, that’s just fine with him. After all, Boutlier keeps his own in-between pile. He thinks of his mound as a visual to-do list, since it often includes clothes that probably need to go to the dry cleaner and items he’s considering donating. He says the idea that he’ll actually do those tasks in a timely fashion is “delusional thinking. Completely. But in the grand scheme of delusional thinking, it’s pretty harmless.”
For those last few pairs of pants: Interior designer Tracy Morris, principal of Tracy Morris Design in McLean, Va., says clients rarely request a piece of furniture specifically for holding laundry. Still, she’s under no illusion that the benches and chairs she adds to bedrooms don’t wind up serving that purpose… Morris has her own laundry chair, too — a fact she has no qualms about admitting. “Sometimes I’m like, okay, I have gotten everything clean except for three pairs of pants that are folded on my laundry chair,” she says. “That’s okay. They’re going to sit there.” That’s because those pants belong there, at least for now.
The third place: And really, don’t we embrace the gray area — the happy medium, the middle ground — in other aspects of life? That’s how Wyatt Yankus, a geopolitical analyst who lives in D.C., feels about the laundry chair, a feature of the home he considers “vital.” He’s had one since he was a kid (much to his mother’s dismay), and after all this time, he’s developed a theory about its purpose: “The way that people talk about coffee shops being the third place between home and the office, I kind of think of the laundry chair as being the third place between a drawer and the hamper.”
Wait, I’m easily distractible, and you can’t just drop a “geopolitical analyst” into an article on piles of laundry in the bedroom — let alone one named Yankus! How did the writer engage this Wyatt Yankus? “Let’s see, I’ve spoken with interior designers, some psychologists… time to bring in the geopolitical analyst!” And Yankus is based in the DC area, so is there a secret bedroom cabinet to the executive branch we don’t know about? Or in the CIA? Is a spy now going to take me out if I stop using the laundry chair?! Was J. Edgar Hoover a closet laundry chair user?! WaPo needs to go back to Mr. Yankus to get me these answers!!
Aside from being rattled with these new questions on US intelligence systems, I found the ethos of this article comforting. I appreciate any argument that finds some way to frame apparent disorder as an attempt towards order. That heap of jeans right there, that’s not my inability to carry them the rest of the way to the closet. It’s a manifest expression of intent. And that’s important! It’s like a promise that **someday** those jeans will be delivered to their rightful place. Really when you think about it, the laundry chair is emblematic of the American Dream. Or Sisyphus’s quest to get the rock up the hill. Or any metaphor you’d like to insert here to affirm that the laundry chair means everything but I’m just not gonna finish tidying up today. And that’s ok. The struggle itself towards the sorted laundry is enough to fill a man’s heart, to quote Camus.
Photos credit: Надежда Окопник, Laura Link and Karolina Grabowska on Pexels
