What is your Laundry System?

[sweetpeas]

Haven't read other replies, but laundry is the one thing that I feel like I actually have under control.

The NUMBER ONE thing that helped me was cutting all of our wardrobes back to bare minimum! Before that, my problem was getting it put away. I'd end up with baskets and baskets of clean laundry and never get them put away. Once we each only had about a week's worth of clothes in our closets (when I switched, I just boxed everything else up, I didn't actually get rid of it, just in case . . . ) if I didn't get clothes put away, the clean clothes got pulled out of the basket to be worn, so it never reached a point of overwhelming.

Around the same time (all of this was when the twins were 3 or 4) I started hanging our clothes instead of using the dryer. At that point, we lived in a development that didn't allow clotheslines (and didn't have a convenient way to have a clothesline anyway) so I started hanging our clothes directly on hangers and hanging from shower rods, the wire shelving in the laundry room, etc. Having the girls' clothes on hangers meant they could put their own clothes away (they had a low closet rod so could hang their own). (another change I made around the same time I hang everything except socks, underwear & pjs. Those don't have to be "folded" per se, so the girls could put away all their own clothes. Putting way dh's & mine was now quick & easy (BUT obviously there was time involved in "hanging" the laundry onto the hangers).

As far as linens. Sheets, unless we have a pee/throw-up incident in the middle of the night, I put the same sheets back on the bed. I wash them in the morning, put them back on the bed at bedtime. No folding required and the whole "someone needs to sleep in this bed NOW" forces the issue of doing something with the clean sheets.

Towels, well, we're weird . . . we use cheap washcloths instead of paper towels and cloth baby wipes instead of toilet paper (some of us anyway). So . . . once a week or so, I do a load that's more like a cloth diaper load (rinse with baking soda, then wash on hot) because of the wipes. I include bath towels in that load too (and unless I can hang it in the sun on the line, that load goes in a hot dryer). Ever since the girls were toddlers, they "helped me" fold that load (little kids stack the baby wipes into a nice stack and take them to the basket in the bathroom. By age 5 or 6 they can fold the cheap washcloths into 4ths. . . Now that the girls are older, we usually do that load while I'm reading, or we're listening to an audio book and they do all of it. Trying to remember . . . pre-kids (and therefore just kitchen & bath towels), I think bath towels I did same as sheets, generally had one set that went straight from dryer back to the bathroom towel rod.

Now we live out in the country and do hang clothes out on the line, which means the whole "already on a hanger" thing doesn't exist.


In our last house (twins were ages 5-9) when our bedrooms were next to each other, part of bedtime routine was for the 3 of us (and as Lina got old enough she "helped" to quickly hang/put away that day's clean laundry. I think early on I put everything on hangers, as they got old enough (I don't remember when) they put their own stuff on hangers). Now their room is upstairs & ours is downstairs so big girls put their clothes away (and one of them puts Lina's on hangers which she hangs up (and she puts her socks, uw, pjs away). I put dh's & my clothes away.

It all sounds complicated, but it's not . . .