I Have a Question for You

Where do you accumulate your dirty laundry?

• Do you have a laundry room?
• If yes, a laundry shoot?
• Do you have a laundry basket in every bedroom?  Or do you use a hamper?
• Do you have one basket/hamper and wash as soon as it is full?
• Do you throw it right in the washing machine and start it as soon as it is full?  (My sister in-law does this.)
• Where in the room do you keep your laundry basket - in a closet or in the open?
• How many floors does your home have?
• On what floor is your washer/dryer?
• How many people are in your household?

I have a two story home (three if you count the finished basement) with bedrooms upstairs and the washer and dryer are in the bathroom on the main floor.  There are six adult sized people in my house:  my husband and I and four teenagers (three are boys).  So you can imagine the laundry situation.  The reason I am asking about this is because the fourth teenager just recently moved in with us and now the laundry dynamics need to be rethought.  

Right now I have two laundry baskets in my linen closet in the upstairs hallway.  My husband and I and our youngest son put our laundry in those baskets (one for colors, one for whites).  My oldest son is technically an adult and so I make him wash his own clothes and he has a laundry basket in his room.  He had it out in his room and I threw it in his closet.  My daughter also washes her own clothes because she wears several outfits a day and then throws them on the floor, so I quit.  I also have my two oldest children wash their own clothes because at some point they need to learn, right?

So now I don't know what to do with the two younger boys (both will be high school freshmen in the fall).  They don't really have room for a laundry basket or a hamper.  The other issue is that these clothes get SMELLY!  I have an extremely weak sense of smell, so that does not affect me, but is does affect everyone else, and I do care about them.  But the one advantage to keeping each person's laundry separate is that I don't have to figure out whose is whose when folding and putting away.  This is especially difficult because we hand down from one to another.

So let's have it.  What do you do with your smelly, dirty laundry until you wash it???