Laundry Time Savers

Laundry! How to save time doing it!

I absolutely hate doing laundry; it must be my least favorite chore to do around the house. Well, wait a minute maybe I cannot really narrow it down to laundry alone I hate chores altogether really who doesn’t. So the best deal for me is to do it less. The more time I have to do other things besides laundry the better. I have already told you how to save at least $300 per year by making your own laundry soap, and if you missed it I encourage you to go HERE and learn how.

Now let me tell you how to save something called time, the one thing that is precious to any Mom. Saving time in the long run will save you money.

Once you are a teen ager in my house, your clothes are your responsibility. This is done for two reasons. I hate going into a teenager’s gross and stinky room and trying to gather clothes off their floor. If they are smart enough to put the clothes in the bathroom hamper, they will get their clothes washed by me, but as a rule, they leave their clothes all over their bedroom floor and so it becomes their problem. Now your teenager will wait until they absolutely have nothing to wear and wash one big load on Sunday night about ten o’clock at night and if you can stand the noise of the dryer at that time of night you never have to touch stinky teenage clothes again! Ahhhhhh! Halleluiah!

The other reason I feel like they should do their own clothes is to learn responsibility. Laundry is a good learning experience for them. They learn how to be responsible for their own self, time management, and how to do their own laundry when they leave my house and go out into the real world.
Now that is one times saver down, you just saved yourself about a million hours. Because I don’t know about you but once I walk into a teenager’s room I cannot help but to pick up a few things, get some dirty dishes that have crusted over, and find all of my forks and glasses that are MIA.

Next! Do laundry by room. Each room has a dirty clothes basket, you wash those clothes in that room, and then when they are clean you take them back to the same room to put away. Now you don’t have to fold and sort in the laundry room, or in front of the TV in the living room. Whenever I do that the clothes never seem to get put away, and we end up dressing from that basket in the middle of the living room floor.

So here is an example:
I have a dirty clothes hamper in our master bedroom. There is where my closet is located and all of the dressers where my clean clothes go. I pick up a pile of clothes from that dirty clothes hamper and take it to the laundry room. I wash those clothes, and then I put those clothes in the dryer, or hang out on the line. When they are dry I put them in a basket and take them into the bedroom where they go.

There as I pull the underwear out of the basket; I fold those clothes and put them in the drawer. As I pull his shirt out of the basket I grab a hanger from the closet and hang it up where it goes, and so on and so on until the basket is empty. Now I only have to touch the clothes once. If I were to fold them in the laundry room they might just stay there and never get put away. If I were to bring them into the living room and fold them while I watch TV, they would stay on the floor next to my chair. Even if I did randomly out of blue actually remember to put the clothes away after I folded them and then put them back into the basket I would still have to pick them up one by one out of the basket after I have folded them . Touching them twice and taking up more and more of my time. I deal with them once and it saves time.

This works for every room in the house. The towels in the bathroom, the short people’s rooms too. I wash all my three year olds clothes at the same time, so I only take them to his room to put them away and I am not running all over the house to put away one basket full of clothes.
I still only wash clothes when I have a full load too! You know your family generates plenty of laundry if they hadn’t you would not have it building up all the time. Do you know what else this means? You save money from laundry tragedies also. You know what a laundry tragedy is, that is when someone leaves a crayon in their clothes pocket and it gets all over every single piece of clothing that was in the wash. Sometimes it gets inside your washing machine or dryer and you don’t realize it and you get it all over the next load too!

Well if you wash all of your toddler’s clothes together at the same time with his crayon, then your toddler will be the only one naked. Not you. If I wash my clothes with my toddlers then the crayon will inevitably only get on my favorite brand new, never can be replaced, one of a kind, beautiful , wonderful and fabulous shirt and not one piece of that stupid crayon will melt on anyone else’s clothes.

If you have to add another room’s laundry to make a full load use the room that is right next to it that way you still just walk from one room to the other, and not all over the house. When I lived in Maine we lived in an old farm house and all of the bedrooms were up stairs but the laundry room was not. I hate that. Any how this saved time and my trips up and down the stairs if I only did one room or two rooms next door to each other. Pull two loads of laundry, go down stairs, wash it, and bring it back up to the rooms. Two loads are all you need to do a day anyhow.
You don’t need to sort too much, really in my family I have only a few different types of loads. Most colors can go together and if not they are probably delicates and should be washed alone anyhow. The other loads I do are whites, towels, and sheets.

What about you,do you have a smarter way to do laundry? I have developed this “Laundry Procedure” or Laundry SOP from years of trials and piles of laundry. This is what works for me. I think it makes more sense. I figured it out when I was a waitress part time. While being a waitress you try to save as many steps as you possibly can by carrying everything you can so you don’t have to make two trips. This saves time, steps, makes more tips, and it can be use it just about anywhere in your life. Work smarter, not harder! That’s the key and it works in laundry too.