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Comment by jefftk | Hacker News Reader

You'd want a door of some sort to keep things (cats, children) from falling down it, no?

It's like an 8-inch-square hole. Big enough for a shirt or pants or a towel to slide down, maybe with a nudge from a foot. By the time a kid can open the closet door to get to the hole, they'd have a hard time fitting through it. Any cat that falls through a hole in the floor has only itself to blame, and can likely manage the problem just fine.

We have kids and a cat and none have had trouble with it. It's not half as dangerous as and has a lower attractive-nuisance factor than any set of stairs.

8" square is pretty big: 11" on the diagonal. I think my 6yo would fit through that fine, though she has the sense not to.

Yeah I thought we might end up having to temporarily stick some ply across it or something when we moved in, but it's never been an issue. Our kids are psycho daredevils who don't listen for shit, so I have to assume it's just not that interesting to them. I think the diagonal sheet metal in the hole helps. Effectively, the hole in the ceiling under it is offset by the width of the hole itself, and the metal directs stuff between the hole in the floor and the hole in the ceiling under it, which means that you can't really get a good look at stuff falling down. You can see it go through the hole if you look in at an angle, but not the fall to the floor. The metal itself would be rad as hell to slide hot-wheels down, except it's pretty short and you can't see the car fall on the other side very well so I guess it's more fun to just throw them off the stairs, or the deck, or whatever. Its residing in a small, boring linen closet probably helps.

Growing up, my house had a laundry chute. In retrospect, it was probably installed by my dad. It was in the en-suite bathroom of the master bedroom, and had a door in the cabinet of the bathroom that folded down like a dishwasher door. It opened up directly on top of the washing machine in the basement.

I remember crawling up and down it all the time as a kid while playing hide and seek or whatever. In fact it had a flaw of a weak latch. Sometimes when you closed the bathroom door, The laundry chute door would fall open, blocking the bathroom door from opening. When this happened the only way to resolve it is to send a small child up through the laundry chute to close its door.

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