We Still Need To Do The Laundry!

The laundry will keep coming, no matter what is going on in the world today.  The coronavirus season will either increase or decrease the laundry in your home.   I say this because as our activities change during this season, you may have more time right now to focus on your laundry area.

Some people who are not going into their place of work and working remotely from home may not need to “get dressed for work” and could possibly reduce the amount of laundry that is created during the week.  Others will discover an increase in their family’s laundry because more people are home. 

Whatever your laundry situation is, if you need to work on your laundry area, this may be a good time to jump into this project! Begin by evaluating what your laundry area is being used for. Is it only a laundry area, or is it a multi-purpose area? Has it become a dumping ground for things because you’ve been “too busy” to slow down long enough to create easy to use systems and maintain them?  This season of life that we are all looking at right now may be just what you need to make some changes in your laundry room!

• Take out the trash - throw out anything that is trash
• Put things away - this can be a dumping ground, so put things back where they belong
• Sort through your laundry supplies - eliminate what you don’t use
• Keep on the supplies that you use - get rid of those products that you "just had to have"
• Do you laundry - now is the time to get caught up
• Fold your laundry
• Put it away! 

Do you have an easy and functional way to corral the dirty laundry that needs to be washed?  How do you manage the clean laundry? Who does the laundry - is it your or is it a family group effort?  Can the laundry room be simplified?

Some people like to do all their laundry on one day of the week. If this is your preferred way, how do you contain it until it needs to get washed?  We have bins in our laundry room that are designated by color or type. These are the bins that we use in our house: special (hand wash/hang dry), towels/sheets/blankets, colors, whites, and dark colors.  Our family has used the same laundry baskets for 19 years! They just stay in the laundry room. The dirty laundry gets put into the correct basket, and when it is full, it gets washed. I know that a full laundry basket is one load.  

Others like to do laundry throughout the week.  I have done 1-2 loads of laundry every day for years when everyone lived at home.  (This year we are down to 4 out of 8 people). There was no way under the sun that I could do it all in one day.  Now I am able to do laundry just a few days a week. I prefer this method to the all in one day method because I can easily fold the laundry at the end of the day before I go to bed. 

Once the laundry is done, it’s time to fold and put away.  This is where a lot of people stop. They just don’t like to fold and put away laundry.  This leads to piles of clean clothes that sit unfolded - getting wrinkles - and potentially getting mixed up with dirty clothes.  I’ve seen this happen. Then there is so much more laundry to do when you don’t know what’s what.

Creating a simple system is key to making doing your laundry easy. Whoever folds the laundry in our home puts the clean clothes in each person’s assigned spot.  Then, everyone picks up their clean laundry from the laundry room. It’s an easy delivery system for us. 

Maybe you keep laundry baskets in each bedroom, and send them back with clean clothes. Perhaps your family members do their own laundry.  If this is the case, assign each person their day of the week to do their laundry and put it away. My family members now do their own laundry, and I just keep up with the laundry for my husband and myself, sheets, and towels.
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I'm encouraging you to use this season as an opportunity to dig into your laundry room and make changes that will help make it easy!

Figure out what works best for you, and I’d love to see what your laundry room looks like!

Let’s Do it Together!