Laundry chute doors — 2 places to buy them, in powder-coated metal

Ha! Here is an obscure product you bet you didn’t even know you wanted – but now you do – and now you know where to get: A laundry chute door. 

And here’s another one — designed and manufactured by Air Rite Service Supply in Lakewood, Ohio, USA. It’s also powder-coated metal.

And the one above: Alas, discontinued: It’s available from American Metal Products / Lima Register … made of powder-coated steel … comes in 10″ or 12″ widths … and includes “spring-hinged, push-in laundry chute door with inner rubber guards for quiet closing.”

Consult with a licensed professional / check local building codes before installing, or if you have one — a reader has pointed out that in some communities, laundry chutes are considered a fire hazard. 

Do we all have laundry chute stories?
“I certainly remember my first one,”
she says longingly, as if recalling a childhood sweetheart.

Here’s Ann-Marie’s:

…I do have a laundry chute story from my childhood. My sisters and I were always forgetting our keys to get in to the house after school, but we could usually borrow the spare key from the neighbor.

One day, we realized we had forgotten to return Mrs. Neighbor’s key. We puzzled and puzzled over how to get into the house without a key.
Finally, being the resourceful little schemers that we were, we figured out that my sister Lisa was probably skinny enough to go up the laundry chute (a cut out in the bathroom cupboard, with a tube like protrusion hanging from the basement rafters).

The basement was accessible from the garage, which we were able to get into, because the garage door did not lock.

We pulled an act worthy of a circus, with me standing on a box, Ginny on my shoulders, and we crammed Lisa into the chute.

Of course she got stuck, but Ginny and I didn’t care. What is the life of one little sister worth when you are missing the afternoon’s episode of original “Star Trek” rerun? (Captain Kirk was so dreamy.)

So we just twisted her and kept shoving until she popped through, and, the day was saved.

To this day, we cannot figure out why we got in so much trouble for that little escapade. My theory was that it scared my parents into seeing how easy it would be for bad guys to break into our house to steal all our stuff, of which I was sure we had plenty.