Like death and taxes, laundry is a certainty of life. Just when you finish one week’s dirty piles, there’s new ones starting to mount. I’ve attempted to do one load per day, or knocking it all out on a certain day of the week. Or maybe you wash one person’s at a time, rotating through your household. Or maybe you just throw in the towel and make your kids do it all. What’s your plan for one of the most basic mom duties of life? Here’s your chance to share your knowledge base, Moms.
Sorting
My husband and I have our own separate baskets that we each use for dirty laundry. My daughters share a bedroom and have more clothes than anyone else, so they use a pre-sorted basket like this one on Amazon. When the piles fill up, I usually make the girls empty their baskets into piles on my bedroom floor and then add my husband’s and my clothes to their sorted piles. My son has his own basket and I tend to just throw all of his clothes in the washer at once without pre-sorting. It feels time consuming and wasteful. I’m thinking of getting my husband and I a basket like the girls’ because it would speed things up and I could just grab the bins and toss in the washer.
Is there a secret sauce to laundry efficiency? Lend me your pearls of wisdom…
Folding and Putting Away
When clothes are clean, they get tossed out onto our bed and – if we’re lucky – the same day they get sorted into baskets for the girls and they put away their own clothes. They do most of the sorting and always put away their own stuff. I put away mine, my husband’s and our son’s.
To be honest, more often than not, the clean clothes sit in a mountain on our bed to minimize wrinkles. Seems smart, right? Then at bedtime when I’m too tired to fold and put away, they get moved to a nearby chair or laundry basket until the next day when the process starts all over again. Only now, they’re not just one load, but five or six. Sometimes they’ll get moved back to the bed and the chair for more than a week until I throw a fit and make the girls put their clothes away, since I usually make time to tackle ours and the little man’s. I frequently feel frustrated and want to just chuck the clothes out the window because it seems as if no one wants their stuff in their drawers.
Tell me I’m not alone, here…
Stain Removal
When it comes to removing stains, I’m pretty lazy. The kids outgrow clothes so fast, I feel like it’s not worth the effort. But when I do put a little elbow grease into making white shirts white again, I use Shout spray, Borax in the water, or liquid bleach if it comes to it.
What’s your go-to stain fighting tool? Make Mr. Clean proud…
Any other laundry tips you’d like to share? I’m all ears!