Parenting Teens: The Clothes Battle

There is an upside to having just two kids in the house! Let the battle for a neat laundry room begin. We live in an old house that is seriously closet challenged. Ichabod lives in the basement.  He doesn’t have a closet but since he would not store his clean clothes in it anyway that is not a problem. He has a dresser but it is too difficult to move the clothes 6 feet as the crow flies from the washroom to the dresser. He has a clean clothes basket in the washroom.  Everyone has a clean clothes basket that in theory was supposed to travel from the basement every Tuesday night upstairs filled with clean clothes and return empty sometime before Monday when I start the wash. Reality is no one (meaning those under 21) toted those baskets up to their bedrooms where the closets and dressers yearn to store those clothes.  The clothes would be tossed over the laundry room as people searched through the baskets for their clothes.  By the end of the week the laundry room looked like a bomb exploded in it. To complicate the situation I couldn’t tell Princess’ clothes from Ichabod’s. On them Princess’ clothes looked very feminine and Ichabod very masculine, not to mention the sizes were very different. As I pulled them out of the dryer I couldn’t tell them apart.

Princess is now at college and I know exactly whose clothes are tossed over the laundry room. I am now thinking through the most effective plan to motivate Ichabod to keep his clean clothes in his basket.

Anyone have a clever suggestion?