$Million idea #1

Twisket: 2 in 1 Laundry Hamper

File this one under "Can't believe this hasn't been done yet". I always had the problem in college (and anytime I have been responsible for my own laundry. Thanks Mom!) of only having one dirty clothes hamper. Why is that such a problem? Well one hamper means that I have to either carry all my clothes down 6 flights of stairs to the laundry room or leave clothes in piles all over my room. While I agree that the clothes piles are part of the aura of Laundry Day, it is probably not a good solution. Neither is buying multiple hampers or baskets -- who wants to spend the extra money and take up the extra space in your already tiny room or closet?

Enter the Twisket (name was conjured up during drinks, don't hold it against me) which is just a marketing-appealing way of saying twin baskets. The idea is actually quite simple:




Normally you would have a giant basket of clothes like the one on the left here. Nothing special about this hamper really, its full of clothes and takes up the normal amount of space in your closet or room. I know, looks pretty cool already, doesn't it? Just wait though, it gets better...





The problem with this hamper/basket is that when you need to separate your whites and darks, it is worthless. If only you could break the hamper in half to use the top and bottom as 2 baskets (one for whites, one for darks). Hmm, so kinda like this:

Why YES! Exactly like that! Awesome, so now you can take your whites to the laundry room and leave your darks in a basket in your room without taking up anymore floorspace than you had prior. Hooray! However, there is one more problem. The top basket in the drawing, the clothes would drop right through it when you take it off the second one. That's not a very good basket if it doesn't even hold anything...

Innovation to the rescue again! The top basket has an extra layer on its walls that folds down and locks in place to provide a floor for the basket and allows you to carry stuff in it. When you put it back on top of the bottom basket, just fold the flooring back up and it locks into the side walls again.

There you have it, complete with horrible and crude looking images, the first $1,000,000 idea I am sharing with the blogosphere. I have been holding onto this little gem since college and never really got around to finding money for it or even building a prototype.

Even though I'm freely giving it away, if you take this idea please let me know! I'd like to keep track of how much money I've given away with this blog.