My clothes have always been on the floor.

Since I was a kid, I’ve just left them on the floor, in no order at all. Just like every mother, I’m sure, my mom yelled at me to pick my clothes up off of the floor when I was a kid, but she did it to me in junior high school. And in high school, she just gave up. All throughout college, I left my clothes in roommates’ way. Even now, when I pretty much have my apartment to myself, when laundry time comes around I find myself jumping and tiptoeing through my room, trying to find a safe path between mountains of clothing that need to be washed.

I’m not generally dirty. Sure, I’ll procrastinate when necessary, and I will let dishes pile up for at least a little while. But nothing criminal– I’ll always get the dishes away before they start to smell. At least from all the way across the room. And my clothes aren’t actually that smelly, they’re just everywhere. I don’t get them too dirty, I just leave them all over the place. Eventually, I get tired of it, I do laundry, I wear a pair of jeans, and when I throw it on the floor, the cycle begins again.

Here’s the problem, I think: I don’t have anywhere to go with them. I’m not sure I totally understand how the clothes cycle works. I bring them up from the laundry room, put them on hangers. Then, when it comes time to dress, I pull them out, and put them on. Later, I take them off, and… and this is where I get stuck. They’re not dirty enough to throw back in the hamper, but they’re worn, so I can’t put them back on the hangers. And on the floor they go, making me do cartwheels and balance bars trying to step over them daily.

So I’m asking you, dear reader, for your help. It occurs to me that this is not the normal way of things. Everyone has to wear clothes, and everyone deals with the dirty ones, specifically keeping them seperate from the clean ones. How exactly do you do this?

The clothes hamper has occured to me. For a while at college, I set up a basket in the closet in which to keep my dirty clothes, which was quickly overrun and caused clothes to find their ways to all corners of my closet floor, a pain when I had to crawl back in there and fish out my favorite T-shirt (it’s the one with a prison number on the back). So I can see the hamper as the obvious solution, except it hasn’t worked for me. If everyone else in the world is using hampers, I’ll go with the flow and suffer, but there has to be a better solution.

And I’m hoping you have it. If you have a system that works for you, email me and let me know about it. I’ve got to reclaim my floorspace from mounds of used wardrobe.