It is my personal goal to one day have all the laundry in the house both clean and put away.
I realize this is an unrealistic goal for a mother of three, but a mom can dream, can’t she? Yet, every time I return to the laundry room to fold the final load with great anticipation of rejoicing in domestic bliss at the ultimate accomplishment, I find a freshly-deposited pile of clothes awaiting my attention. Welp, maybe next time. The kids must be ensuring my job security.
If you’ve ever found yourself trapped in an unending cycle of washing, drying, and folding, you’re not alone. The struggle to keep a household’s worth of clothes clean and organized is a challenge that parents, especially those with multiple children, know all too well. While achieving the impossible dream of having every article of clothing clean and perfectly stowed away might seem like a fantasy, there are practical steps you can take to wrangle the laundry chaos and regain a semblance of control over your laundry room.
Do you know how much laundry you have to do?
Is it all in one spot and sorted?
I have a little nook in my laundry room that wasn’t being used, so I turned it into a laundry sorting system.
Three trash cans were assigned a certain type of clothes (towels, white/light colored clothes, dark clothes).
I put the labels on the picture so you could get the idea. They aren’t actually written on them. However, while you are training everyone in the house, it wouldn’t be a bad idea to tape a temporary label on each one until everyone understands the system. 🙂
Dirty clothes are brought to the laundry room and sorted into the correct container. My rule is, “check pockets and zip zippers” before this step. However, I don’t really trust this step since I’m kind of fond of my clothes and don’t want a crayon to add new color to them, but it helps.
Now I can quickly look and see if I have enough clothes to run a load. A full trash can is about a load of laundry. Yikes!…as you can see I have about three loads to do today.
My kids didn’t have room for clothes hampers in their rooms, so this solved the problem of where to put all the dirty clothes. This idea will not work for everyone due to space restraints, but perhaps you can adjust this idea into a new form that works for you.
One day….one day the impossible will happen. I WILL win the battle of the laundry.
I’m pretty good with laundry even with just one basket, but then again, I’m pretty much only doing laundry for myself, so it isn’t hard to mentally keep track of what I need of what and when laundry absolutely needs to get done. So I count myself very fortunate at the moment.
🙂 Thanks!