Laundry Day

With only two people in our house, it seems like there is more laundry than there should be. I mean, I remember actually having a weekly “Laundry Day” growing up in a house of seven meant there would be 4-5 loads max. Then again, this was only on my dad’s side. My mom would do a load every day, saying that by spreading out the workload throughout the week just made it part of her daily routine. We on the other hand, average 5 loads a week… at least.

I have a tendency to separate things into organized piles before working on them. Before doing dishes, I will stack the plates together, along with the glasses, bowls, silverware and pans, each in their own pile so they can be cleaned together. Before decorating a cake, I place all of the decorations either in the order I need them, or, in the case of gumpaste flowers, by color, size and/or style. Laundry is the same way. Bath towels are by themselves, which takes up at least one load each week, sometimes two. Whites are another load, consisting of socks, undershirts, kitchen towels and washcloths. Then we have the undergarment load, with my partner’s grey undershirts, and our underwear. Another load of darks has my screen Ts and our dress shirts. And finally a load of sturdies, which has our jeans and khakis and also sweatshirts. Sometimes I combine the darks, but I never wash our dress shirts with pants, mostly for fear the zipper will unzip, the button unbutton, and rip the shirts to shreds. (You do remember to zip and button your pants before washing them, right?)

Okay, so the actual laundering part is easy. We have a high efficiency washer and dryer, so there is no agitator and we can fit more clothes in at a time, which is why we only have about 5 loads each week! The dreaded part is folding. We hated folding, and for the longest time, basically lived out of laundry baskets. Clothes went from the washer to the dryer to the basket and were pulled out and worn as needed until the process repeated itself. Well, after losing my job, my lazy excuse went with it, so I devised a way for me to make sure this doesn’t repeat itself. Get rid of the baskets! Okay, we did keep one for the whites, but no longer use baskets as part of the laundry experience, and I’ll tell you why.

Our washer and dryer have a perfect counter height on top of them, so utilizing that space, I found an easy solution to the laundry folding problem... fold them directly from the dryer! There is ample space for me to separate as I fold, so what I do is take out one item at a time, fold it, and grab the next like-item to go on top of it, keeping my partner’s undershirts together, as well as our respective underpants. The whites are separated a little different (they still have a basket, remember?) I fold the kitchen towels and washcloths and my undershirts on top, but fold the socks and put them directly into the basket. In this fashion, I can put my undershirts on top of the socks, and the kitchen towels and washcloths over them to be dropped off on the way to the bedroom to put away the rest. With this set up, the only clothes that don’t get folded are the dress shirts that need to be hung up, which I always put on the top of the pile so it is the first thing to be taken care of when I get to the bedroom.

My set up may be different from yours, but I hope you can find a technique that works for you. This works for me because of how my brain operates. One thing I’d like to do is create a space above the washer between the upper cabinets in the laundry room to hang dry clothes that can’t be dried in the dryer, so I’ll add a post about that if it ever comes to fruition. If you have a technique that works for you, please feel free to leave a comment to share with others, and maybe, one day, everyone will know how to make “Laundry Day” easier!