I am lucky to have a basement and have ours in an unfinished storage/furnace room. I put a cat door in the door to the basement so the dogs can't get downstairs without being supervised.

For picking up dogs do I slide newspaper under them when they start to go. Just pick up the paper and put that in bag. Never have to touch the stuff.

I only just got my first cat .
Most of my life I’ve lived with cats but I was wise enough to never claim they were mine , so the litter thing was always somebody else’s responsibility :D

My initial plan was to change nothing to make the transition to her new home as comfortable as possible so that meant “negotiating” the bed she currently used , and buying the food she used , the litter she used , and the exact same box .
As she was adopted via petco foundation everything she used was supplied by the store so I was able to buy the same box in the same color , and the store “provides” the bulk/refillable cat litter to them so I also bought that .

I was doing online cat research the day after I picked her up , and read there should be 1 box for each cat plus 1 .
So I’d need 2 for 1 cat .
I was told about a week later that this was only really for large groups of cats and even then was overkill .
Luckily , they’re only about $5 at my local petco .

In the meantime , I’ve been moving her boxes around slightly every couple of days or so as I read they get used to it being in a slightly different orientation/place and it helps transition them should you need to move it to a totally different room , and most people do as they use the bedroom for the “closed quiet room” used in the first week to transition a new cat home and by the time the cat is settled they’re sick of the smell !! :D

I tried an expensive litter , crushed walnuts or something , that was supposed to eliminate smells and not stick to the cats feet so stays in the tray , and the bonus was you only had to change once a month rather than every 2 weeks with normal litter .

It works and The cat liked it , but I didn’t .
With it being dark brown it was harder to find the clumps than the grey I was previously using , and as “clump fishing” is not my favorite pastime I like to get it over with as soon as possible ....

I looked at the fancy litter box “roofs” with filters and doors etc as I’d read even a plain plastic roof is better for smells over an open box .
But I also read a lot of cats don’t like to feel vulnerable boxed in on the box so don’t like them .

I also looked at the “automatically raking” one as they were on offer , but the lady in petco said she spent $80 on one and her cats didn’t like it so she gave it away ..
I might try one in the future when they’re half price again .

So I guess my mistake of buying 2 litter boxes could work out to my advantage in the future as I can experiment on one with fancy hoods and self-raking systems , whilst she still has a “normal” one that she can use

Off-topic to this , but I was told to look in the pet aisle at my local 99c store ..

The $8.00 carboard scratching pads are $2 there , and the $10 brushes are a dollar ;)

I also bought a “clump fishing tool” for a dollar . It’s a little scoop with holes in it and makes the whole process a bit like “panning for gold”
But the holes weren’t really big enough for the loose litter to easily fall through , so I bought a bigger one with bigger openings from petco which is much faster .

laundry room, but I also built a box to put the cat box in to keep the litter they throw/track out contained. otherwise it is all over the floor.

You are over thinking this.

I've had 20 or so cats in my life.

I've never had one, whether it came to me as a kitten or adult, that did not require more than picking it up and dropping it in the box.

Boom, done.

I probably over researched it , but trust me I don’t think too much :D

I’ve lived with more than 20 in my life just never actually been “responsible for them” , so this was all new to me .

It’s all working out ok though .

We have a 4-bedroom house. One room is storage, which gets two litterboxes, and my office gets two litterboxes. My wife's office/guest room gets one box. However, the box in her office has some special "organic" litter that the cats won't go near, so it's effectively a box with some loose material in it, and not really a litterbox. Whether this is by design is an exercise for the reader. The cats love me, and they demonstrate their love by coming into the office and dropping a duece the second I sit down.