How to Simplify Your Laundry
Learn how to easily simplify your laundry system. Get started today!
Laundry has been the bane of my existence for as long as I can remember. It absolutely pushed me over the edge when we had our third baby. It got out of control. As we continued to add more responsibilities, I swear the laundry just kept duplicating! Had another baby, laundry doubled. Plant a garden, laundry doubled. Jon started coaching again, laundry doubled. We would let it pile up until it was out of control. We were overwhelmed and knew we to simplify our laundry, along with the rest of the house. I started turning on decluttering youtube videos and would just go to town on our closets, trying to reduce inventory. I knew the church garage sale was coming up so I bagged up approximately 2/3 of my clothes. Easiest way to simplify your laundry, have less of it, but that wasn’t enough.
Now that we got the inventory under control, we had to get a process down for getting the laundry done. Not just washing and drying it, but getting it actually put away where it belonged. I decided I had to simplify it as much as possible. I found that doing laundry was a lot more overwhelming when there were a lot of time consuming steps. Now, I can take 1-2 loads of laundry from the basket or dryer and have it all sorted and put away in under 10 minutes. Here are a few tips on how to simplify your laundry system.
1: Wash laundry every day
I start a load of laundry every morning before I turn my computer on to work. I switch the laundry during one of my breaks. The load of laundry is ready to be sorted into baskets by the time my work day is done. I would be lying if I said I sort our laundry, air dry pieces, or bleach our whites. We don’t buy expensive clothes, and everything goes into one load, washed on cold to avoid the colors bleeding. I found that if something needed to be hand washed or treated special, it just didn’t get done. I am at a point in my life that I need things to be as simple as possible.
2: Immediately sort the laundry as you pull it out of the dryer
Immediately sort the laundry as you pull it out of the dryer. The laundry should be sorted by person or by location where the laundry will be going. We have five baskets on top of our washer and dryer. We sort the laundry from oldest to youngest as we pull the clothes out of the dryer. I have to share this because I thought it was absolutely genius.
Pro tip: A friend of mine shared that she has her kids help with laundry. She has pictures of each person in the family and lays them out on the floor in the living room. The kids can then sort the laundry by person. It’s like a fun game for them. Until I set the baskets up on top of our washer/dryer, the girls loved this.
3: Make it as easy as possible to put the clothes away.
This comes in handy, especially for kids clothes. They are laundry making machines. I know this may be an
unpopular practice, but I do not fold our kids’ clothes. I found that either I put them away unfolded, or they just didn’t get put away at all. Our girls have baskets in their rooms labeled with pictures for tops, bottoms, dresses, jammies, etc. This makes it easy for them to take their clothes baskets and sort them themselves into each of the categories. This also creates a limit on how many clothes they can have. If their baskets are overflowing, I know it’s time to donate a few things. Baylor, our 1 year old, has a dresser. His dresser has one large drawer for day time clothes, and one large drawer for jammies. One small drawer for socks, and another for pacifiers, diaper cream, etc. This makes it extremely quick and easy to put his clothes away.
For my husband and I, we keep it simple. We each have on drawer for under garments and all of our clothing either gets folded and put on a shelf in our closet or hung up.
There are absolutely other things you can do to simplify laundry. We needed easy things that didn’t feel overwhelming to implement or maintain. Let me know in the comments if there’s anything you do to make laundry simple and less overwhelming! 🙂
Check out my other blog posts for more tips to simplify your home.
