| Help! My Laundry Pile Overfloweth!
I asked blog readers to share how they cope with Mt. Neverest and here were some of the responses I received:
With 9 people in a family, I know what you mean! =) What we do, is go from start to finish - wash, dry, fold. This way there isn't any mountains of unfolded laundry sitting around getting wrinkled. -Cheri
What I do is one load per day. I don't do a whole lot of sorting, aside from the bleachable whites, so most everything can go into the same washer load each day. With this method, I'm constantly doing laundry, but its in a very manageable format. -Denise
I always do start to finish. When the dryer stops (dings), I pull-out, fold and drop into basket. Those things which need hangers or a touch up with an iron go over the back of a chair. When the basket is full, it immediately goes to the bedroom. I then fetch the hanging clothes and put on hangers. The basket cannot set there...like letting the sun go down on your anger, don't go to sleep with laundry not put away! -A.
I fold it right out of the dryer (or off the clothesline) and put it into the laundry baskets already folded. When all of my brothers still lived at home, I sorted it into baskets by destination- I had a basket for my parents, one for me & my grandma, one for the linen closet, then a couple for brothers' clothes. Folding and then putting it right into the destination basket was the only way I could have kept on top of it all :) -Samantha
My Mum (I'm the oldest of 7) has probably the BEST system for washing that I know. She started all of us washing our own clothes when we hit our teen years and hasn't looked back! :) Even the guys have to do their own laundry and it really cuts down on her work plus teaches them responsibility. She currently only washes for herself, my Dad and the two youngest boys (9 & 10). However, when she was still washing for a lot of people she would hang the clothes on the line (doesn't have a dryer) in room/people order. EG little boys room clothes on one part, Mum & Dad's stuff another part etc and that way as she pulled the clothes off the line she folded and placed them in order of rooms. That way as soon as she got back into the house she would just go from room to room placing clothes away. -Rachel
My husband's brother and his family (wife and three children) live in a two room cottage on the side of a mountain in Oregon . Their solution to laundry is to not have very much to begin with! They've pared their wardrobes down to the absolute essentials; this saves on storage and on laundry. I would NOT want to live like this but they seem to enjoy it. -Katie
I periodically have this struggle if I have been too busy and away from home.
We live in Germany for now, and the washing machine is 1/3 the size of a normal American washer. The cycles take about 1.5 to 2 hours. So I feel like all I do is "reboot the laundry". Its the first thing I do after I've gotten ready for the day.
A "reboot" means: new load in washer, hang or tumble dry wet clothes, fold dry clothes, sort by room, and put away.
Before Breakfast: Reboot Laundry
At 10:30: Reboot Laundry
After Lunch: Reboot Laundry
Around 4pm : Reboot Laundry
After Dinner: Reboot Laundry
Before Bed: Reboot Laundry
So if I'm diligent and home all day I can get 6 loads in. Since Tuesday is my errand day, I get behind, but if I do 6 loads the next day I can catch up. This system has worked okay for me. -Alyssa
I have some dear friends at my church and they turn doing the laundry into a family game of fun! They built shelves into their laundry room, and each shelf has a member of the family's name on it. When a load gets pulled out of the dryer. They do an assembly line: one person takes a piece of clothing out and says who it belongs to, the next person folds it, and the next "files" it away on the shelf where it belongs. If they have alot to fold, they switch places every once in awhile so the same person doesn't get stuck with folding the whole time! Once it's done, it is each person (including kids') responsibility to get their folded clothes from the laundry room and put them away in their rooms.
Also, I feel silly sharing this, but growing up my older sister and I had to fold clothes all the time and we despised it. So we started pretending that we had to "fold clothes for the queen" and if we didn't hurry and finish we'd get in trouble! (The queen was imaginary, not my mom!) Anyway, the point is make it into a game..and maybe it will be more enjoyable. -A.
Here's what I do - I wash through the week, and line-dry [or in bad weather dry on racks by the heaters which really bugs me!] then I put away things like undies, night wear, tea towels, bath towels etc. Everything else gets folded into a basket in the study and once a week [unless we run out of clothing!] I iron everything. Maybe you are washing too often or just getting through too many items: I change our entire bed once a week in summer; just the bottom sheet and top pillowcase weekly in winter - and children's bedding gets washed every two weeks unless more frequent washing is needed. I only change our towels weekly as well, unless they are dirty. I think too once there are little ones, standards have to relax a little - for example, I no longer iron dish cloths and tea towels but only fold them, and as we have a patchwork quilt over our duvet, I no longer iron duvet covers.
I have never known English people to express so much difficulty with laundry as Americans do - not criticising but it is a noticeable distinction to me. Maybe you should move to the UK and then that would solve your problem ;o)
Love, Lucy x
In our family, the children would have to wash a particular color of clothing for the week which they had the opportunity to choose themselves. Now that so many of us are older and gone during the day, we have changed our system.
We each wash our own laundry. My mom does her's and my dad's. I do laundry usually just one or two small loads a week. The problem I have run into is that by only doing one person's laundry at a time it seems to waste so much space and soap in the washer. I have started combining clothes by temperature to wash rather than colors. I wash my undergarments with other warm wash clothes and do all my cotton tops and other cotton clothing on cold. For folding, I just fold as the load gets completed. It's manageable coming from just one person.
When we were using our old system, folding was done as soon as it came out of the dryer. When a family member had something he or she was waiting to be washed so they could wear, he or she would remove it and the other clothing items from the basket to fold. Now the bad part is knowing where to put the dirty clothes. We used to have one collective clothes hamper in the kid's bathroom upstairs. However, the bathroom is small so now everyone has a hamper in their room. I don't like this system either because it takes up space in the bedrooms. My other suggestion would be to wear an outfit several days in a row or put the clothing items back in your drawers or closet if it is not dirty at the end of the day. This saves on laundry volume. I do this with the exception of undergarments, of course.
As far as ironing goes, I hardly iron anything unless it's super wrinkled. I have some linen clothes that have to be ironed before I wear them. I do it right before I put them on. Otherwise I try to buy wrinkle resistant clothing. My mom only buys wrinkle-free or wrinkle resistant shirts for my dad. That cuts down on ironing. My mom has showed us that if you remove a garment from the dryer while it is still slightly damp and then hang it up to dry, you won't have to iron it later on. We do this with the dress shirts and slacks.
Curiously, I like doing laundry. It's one of the few household chores that I don't mind doing. I like sorting the clothes, loading them in the washer, selecting the correct water level and temperature and carefully folding them after they are dry. I actually have a feeling of accomplishemnt when I see a freshly washed and folded load of fresh laundry I have completed myself. I know it would be much harder to keep caught up with if I washed clothes for a large family. In this case I would do it one of two ways: 1)Designate a partiuclar day of the week as "laundry day" and do all the laundry on that day or 2) Do a given color on a particular day each week. To me the first method would seem superior as you could devote all your time and energy just to completing the laundry on one day. That's how they did it long ago. They had a "laundry day", "baking day", "mending day", "dusting day", etc. -A.
I want to say that I really understand this problem. My husband helped me out on this issue and I will pass on his excellent advice that is fool-proof. Once I quit being stubborn I really got some victory in this area!
I had no problem getting the laundry washed when we married. Mountians and mountians of it. I piled it up into a mountian of clean laundry, and should have named it Neverest!!! Our bed was piled until I set up tables to fold on and then they were piled. I learned to never take it into the living room or it would be piled high wih clean mountains of laundry. "I need a shirt." "Oh, there's a clean one about half way down the mountian." Finally, I would get ambitious and decide to the top of my " Mount Neverest ." I would work and sweat and fight and conquer Neverest. Aaahh. The thrill of acomplishment was great. I then got right to busy building me another mountian to conquer. I guess somewhere I had the idea that doing laundry all day was the biggest thrill I could have?
Finally, I tried the suggestion my husband had. It sounds silly and too simplistic, but how can I argue with something that really works?
The rule is you finish the job you started. That means you wash, dry, fold and put away/hang up before you do another load. The job of getting a load of laundry is then completed. It will seem slow, too slow. It's not. Which is slower: taking the job all the way to the end or digging through a mountian or two of laundry to go to church, ironing each piece as you get dressed? :-) You have to take time somewhere to do the laundry, why not right when it is ready and isn't all wrinkled and clogging up your living space?
I argued with this for a long time. I thought that I just needed to do better, be more discipline or whatever. Or worse, my argument would be something along the lines of there is no solution, this is just the way it is. Wrong. I agreed to try it and wonder of wonders, sucess the first try! I tried it again. Same results. No growing mountian, only empty drawers filling up. I was amazed. How was this possible?!
Since this amazing discovery I have learned that nearly all the women that I know that are sucessful with their laundry follow this system. Amazing! *grin*
I also learned something else on this recently. Instead of folding and organizing little kids drawers, I now hang up all clothes that can be of my 3 yr old and 18 month old. Getting dressed is a snap, as is putting their clothes away. Socks, underwear, pants and shorts go in drawers, but both kid's folded clothes fit in one small chest of drawers.
Also, downsizing is a good idea. I have done that some and it has made a difference. I am wanting to do it more. You don't have to be weird to have a simple wardrobe.
On a simple laundry washing system, this is mine. I sort my laundry into coloreds, whites, jeans, towels and baby clothes. Anything that needs special washing I put seperately but I don't have many of those. When one of these catagories is full, into the washer it goes. And then into the drawers/closets. -Nichola
What great comments on laundry you have accumulated. We are a family of 7. This equals to 23 loads per week for us, give or take a load or two. :-)
I wash 3-4 loads per day for six days, and unless someone is sick during the night, I do not wash on Sunday. Each person has an assigned day for their bedding to be washed, since we have several with dust-mite allergies. And I do combine the 3 little boys' bedding to be washed on the same day.
My 2 older ones do their own laundry and bedding. They are 14 and 10. I still oversee the process to make sure they do it.:-)
We tend to have more laundry in the winter when the boys and DH are wearing blue jeans every day.
We wash, dry, and fold as we go along. And that helps a lot. Each person has a designated spot for the laundry to be placed as it is folded, and DH & I share the only laundry basket.
I also learned to separate clothes as we change them. I have a dark clothes bin, a light clothes bin, and a towel clothes bin. It is very easy to see what load needs to be put on each morning. The older ones keep their dirty laundry in bins in their rooms.
You'll have a process down to a science by the time you have your dozen children. LOL
Blessings, Tami
My husband built me some diagonal shelves up one corner of our basement (where my laundry room is), on which 4 baskets sit. We sort our laundry into the baskets sitting on the shelves, one for towels, colors, whites and jeans.
If we notice a basket is getting full, someone starts a load. When the load is washed and dried, we have a table that has different colored crates for each family member. (You could write names on baskets or crates as well). The laundry is immediately folded out of the dryer into each person's basket and then each one is responsible to put away their clothes. Of course I put my husband's away. :-) This is definately for older children, but it has worked well for us. I know not everyone has sufficient space either to do something like this, but those of you who do, it works great. -Pam
I have 12 children so can sure identify with the laundry scenario. I also chat with many women since I speak frequently on Home Organization and Time Management. It is often the lack of a proper system that makes things so complicated. I highly recommend one hamper(durable plastic and well vented) be placed in the bathroom closest to the bedrooms. Everyone heads to the shower or bathroom before bed to clean up so they need to be trained to take their garments to the hamper. Each morning the hamper is carried to the laundry area and sorted into 4 bins. One for premanent press, one for T-shirts and sweat shirts, one for all dark socks and jeans and heavier fabric clothes, also the last one is for whites in which all white socks, towels and undies and dish cloths are put. Wash all coloured clothes using cold water but perm/press and whites do better with warm water wash. I have recently purchased the heavy duty stackable wash/dry systems which is by far the best choice out there. If you do have the traditional wash/dry which are side by side then do just that, make sure they are installed beside each other. Use the top of the 2 appliances as a folding center. Get use to using the timer and fold clothes immediately when finished. Make sure there is an area to hang p/p when it is done on a rod or hooks. The area above the washer and dryer can have 2 - 3 open shelves mounted above it. On these shelves place a rubbermaid dishpan for each family member. Label the front of the bucket with each members name and as soon as the clothes are folded place them into each person seperate bucket. Mom only should ever put her and Dads clothes away and the kids should be responsible from the time they are 3-4 to carry their own clothes bucket to empty it. Washing 2 loads a day rather than leaving it when it is unsurmountable is far better. Sort your laundry at night before bed and get one washer load started at night. It is finished by morning and you are ahead of the game and only have one load to do a day. If you allow your kids to leave dirty laundry in their rooms and you collect it its your fault. Who is the more intelligient one? Mom should be and remember she is to be a servant not a slave. Have fun with this one and I do know it works. - Dawn
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