So, you have not-so-dirty secret. I had a not-so-dirty secret and I would hazard a guess that many others have a not-so-dirty secret. We have all at one stage or another been the not-so-proud owners of a floor drobe.
A floor drobe is the term used to describe your worn but clean clothes scattered or piled on the floor. There is something about putting your worn clothes back in the cupboard that doesn’t feel right. They’re probably a little dirty and you going to wear them again, so you want them in a convenient spot, more convenient than the cupboard. Hence you drop them on the floor.
If you have enough space in your bedroom you’ll have the chair. The chair where we have all kept various items for days, weeks, and months. Hence, they pile up on all number of bedroom or living room furniture items. You are not the only one to face an overwhelming floor drobe. This is fast becoming a well-documented phenomenon on social media with half of Britons admitting to having a floor drobe. In response, people have devised multiple different approaches such as different laundry bins while some have just given up and learnt to live with it.
The Birth of a solution The Floor-Drobe in a London Flat
I recently moved to London and here, in our small flat, we have no space for a chair. My clothes were on the floor constantly. So, I needed my own solution because hated having my clothes on the floor. I needed a clothing rack, that was small, compact, and well-designed but also discreet. I wanted something subtle. And The Floor-Drobe was born.
Slowly at first, I tinkered and bought various towel racks off Amazon, seeing if they could replace the chair, perhaps, even be more optimal than the chair. I watched this video by Tim Dessaint which was helpful. But I quickly realized that folding my not-so-dirty clothes over small compact beams was not going to work. I could not be asked, after a long day, to fold my pants or hoodie and slide them into a tiny slit between to cross beams.
Meanwhile the hook solution was working great… for my pants, shorts and my girlfriend’s dresses. If the piece of clothing had a loop through which you could hang the clothing on the hook, the design provided a quick simple solution to keeping your clothes off the ground resulting in a much cleaner bedroom. And further, kept them from being creased as gravity naturally kept the fabric straight. However, if I hung my hoodies or shirts on the hooks that would damage the clothing. The hook would stretch the fabric behind the collar making a permanent lump in the fabric – not ideal.
Floor-Drobe as an innovative a solution for your laundry
So, there needed to be some innovation, a new clothes rack. One that you could easily put clothes on but that also didn’t damage the fabric of your clothing. And so, I tinkered some more, inspired by clothing hangers, I designed a short, curved edge that distributed the weight of the hoodie and shirt to make sure it could hang without stretching the fabric. I cut clothing hangers, glued them to my existing ladder and tested out different lengths and curvatures to find the right mix – 9cm length with 1 cm curve.
The new curved hook provided a neat solution to hanging your hoodies, shirts, and anything else. And just like that I had beaten my old floor drobe, never again would my clothes lie unceremoniously on the floor. What would I call this new handy piece of furniture, The Floor-Drobe after the very monster it sort to destroy.
Embrace a Clean Home with the Floor-Drobe
The Floor-Drobe a simple yet purposeful solution to hanging your worn clothing.
It uses a combination of different types of hooks to hang shirts, trousers, and dresses as well as additional space to fold clothes over the cross beams. It has been purposefully built to be discreet when placed in the bedroom/living room while being the convenient place to quickly store and hang the clothes you’ve just worn.
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