How to Not Hate Laundry
I don’t hate laundry.
That’s because I’ve been strategic in how our family approaches laundry and while it’s evolved over the years, I think you may be able to glean some useful tips from our current system. Keep in mind that we have a 4 person household and 2 of those people are little and contributing a lot of dirty laundry into the system (hello potty training and playing in the mud) and not currently doing a lot to help out with the cleaning and putting away of clothes. I see that evolving in the future as they get older and my plan is to have them wash and put away their own laundry as they get older.
We have one central repository for dirty clothes. When we need to do laundry, it isn’t this huge effort to collect all of the hampers from various locations around the house. We keep ours in our main floor bathroom where we shower. Update: we just renovated our main floor bathrooms and we now have a LAUNDRY CHUTE!
We sort on the spot. We have 3 distinct hampers: 1 for whites, 1 for darks/colors and 1 for towels. When an item is soiled, it immediately goes into its designated hamper. Update: with the laundry chute, this has changed a bit but we have an easy way to sort that isn’t too time consuming.
We have the stain remover spray right next to the dirty clothes so we can spot treat before we drop the soiled clothes down the chute.
We don’t wash clothes after every wear. I personally wear wool almost exclusively and I can get an impressive number of wears out of the same garment just by addressing spills quickly with a clean, wet rag and hanging the garment to air out overnight. I also exclusively wear wool socks and can wear them 2-3 times before washing. My kids and husband also wear wool socks. We don’t wash pajamas after every wear either. And full disclosure: if my kids have clothes that are still clean at the end of the day, I will put them back in their drawer to be worn again. This saves on time and effort but it also saves your clothes. Most wear in a garment comes from the washing process (unless you have a 7 year old boy, then all the wear apparently comes from sliding on their knees at recess). The less you can wash a given garment, the longer it will last.
We have split up laundry duties between my husband and I. My husband owns the washing/drying part and I own the putting away part.
I don’t fold my kid’s pajamas.
I don’t pair socks.
I don’t hang up very many pieces. My husband is the only household member that has hanging items and he generally hangs them up on his own.
I don’t turn clothes that are inside out right side out. Usually the way they go into the dirty hamper is the way they get put away in their drawer.
We store our clothes on the main floor (where the showers are located) instead of our bedrooms upstairs (where there is no shower).
We don’t have huge wardrobes (I believe in a “magic number” of clothes for my young sons and my husband and I prefer small wardrobes and “uniforms”).
There are lots of variables to consider when designing a laundry system that works for your family. Frequency, location and type of dirty hampers, sharing of the workload with other able members of your household, where you store clean clothes and your preference for folding clothes (and choosing to not fold some or all of your clothes). You can experiment with changes until you have created a system that works well and it can evolve with your family as time goes on.
I believe you will know that you have landed on a good system when laundry no longer feels like this big, oppressive task. When you have a good system you don’t have to block off a large amount of time for laundry. Laundry is something that just happens and that you can fit into the nooks and crannies of your day. You can fold a load and put a load of laundry away pretty quickly and effortlessly. When you can fit laundry around your life, and not your life around your laundry routine, you will know you have landed on a solid system.
