Does your old home have a dumbwaiter?

[Anonymous]

The only dumb waiter in our house is my wife. She’s also a dumb dishwasher.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:This just reminded me that my grandparents had a laundry shute. You could just chuck the dirty laundry down and it landed next to the washing machine. I thought it was the greatest thing ever. Now that I'm an adult, I realize that they still had to carry the clean clothes up the stairs. Do people still have laundry chutes?

We have a laundry chute in our Fairfax county colonial built in 1970. I love it so much. It goes from the master bedroom to the laundry room. So I can just take off an item of dirty clothes and put it down the chute, so that the dirty clothes are already down there when I'm ready to run a wash. It is my favorite feature of our house.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:The only dumb waiter in our house is my wife. She’s also a dumb dishwasher.

I think you are trying to be funny but failing and you just come across like a huge mean jerk

[Anonymous]

The family I used to babysit for had a dumbwaiter. This was in Baltimore County. It was amazingly cool. The kids used to send toys down it. The house also had it's original (and restored) bell system where you could pull a string and a bell in the servants area would ring. And there were stairs, no longer able to use used, that used to be the private stairs for staff.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I lived in a 1901 Sears House and the dining room was right next to the kitchen. So modern! Sadly, no dumbwaiter.

Where else would the dining room have been if not next to a kitchen?

[Anonymous]

Dumbwaiters are cool but imo they would be the most useful in a house where you want to consume food and drinks on a different level than the kitchen.

What works almost as well is just a bus tub. I lived in a group house with a roof deck and a helpful guest who worked in restaurants brought us one. It was so helpful!! It made it 1000x easier to get everything up and down safely.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:The only dumb waiter in our house is my wife. She’s also a dumb dishwasher.

I think you are trying to be funny but failing and you just come across like a huge mean jerk

I thought it was hilarious!

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I lived in a 1901 Sears House and the dining room was right next to the kitchen. So modern! Sadly, no dumbwaiter.

Where else would the dining room have been if not next to a kitchen?

Kitchens were a separate structure for a long time and then they were in the basements of grand houses.

[Anonymous]

Buzzer system to summon staff, which may have been only one live-in person.
Maid’s stairs, closed in to wall with closets on each floor now.
No dumb waiter; kitchen on dining floor.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:A dumb waiter per multiple codes (ICC, IRC, NEC, etc) is a potential fire hazard and should meet current code requirements. Particularly for the prevention of a fire spreading quickly from one floor to another.

A (closed) duct system for heat/ac is not treated as one/for/one the same in the eyes of the code.

A dumb waiter, or similarly, a laundry chute, or other means of travel such as an elevator, have strict requirements or
Mitigations for life and building safety requirements, whether they are apparent to the homeowner or not.

I replied above that we added one to where we used to have on in our historic dc home. Of course it's up to code and was inspected as needed. It's essentially a closed off metal box w/ a sealed door on each end. we have a powerlift 2 stop from dumbwaiters.com. Completely to code, and the inspector actually said he sees them fairly regularly in historic homes when people are upgrading from the historic ones to new ones.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:The only dumb waiter in our house is my wife. She’s also a dumb dishwasher.

I think you are trying to be funny but failing and you just come across like a huge mean jerk

I thought it was hilarious!

It is hilarious.

[Anonymous]

Our home had a dumb waiter but it was repurposed at some point to run ductwork for central air.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:The only dumb waiter in our house is my wife. She’s also a dumb dishwasher.

I think you are trying to be funny but failing and you just come across like a huge mean jerk

I thought it was hilarious!

It is hilarious.

It's hilarious in a Henny Youngman style "take my wife- PLEASE!" way, which is to say, not at all.