If you follow me on Instagram, you may have seen the picture above already. I decided it would be fun to share a little more info as to how I maintain my sanity as the main laundry lady for my family of 6, tackling the endless piles of clothes that end up in our dirty clothes bin day after day.
In our current home of 979 square feet, we have learned to maximize every square inch. The main level of our house has two bedrooms, a bathroom, living room, kitchen & dining room. The basement is the Boys’ Lair – where they sleep and hang out. The laundry room is attached to the Lair but it is also a mud room, closet, storage room & bathroom. This area is not glamorous and it’s rustic & rough around the edges.
One day we’ll paint the walls. Maybe. Our time & resources have been used to make the “living” areas of our home a place of rest. Even though I feel like I “live” in the laundry room because of the endless loads of laundry, it’s not really a place where I’d pull up a chair and read a book. This room is used as a place to come in, do what you need to do – wash, brush, put in your contacts, spike up your mohawk with gel, grab the vacuum, scrub out a stain, fold, sort, hang up a shirt – then head out. This isn’t a hang out room…unless you’re playing hide-n-seek, then it’s a great place to hang out & hide!
Now that you’ve had a glimpse of our space, I thought I’d share some of my laundry sanity saving tips. This isn’t mind-blowing information and there are countless laundry tips floating around the internet but every now and then it helps to get a glimpse into how someone else makes things work in a simple way.
1. Birth order dots in the tags
I started doing this when my kids were little and I got tired of looking at the tags to see if this shirt or pair of pants was 4T or 5T and then trying to remember what kid was wearing what size at their particular stage of life. In those early years of raising babies to toddlers to preschoolers with the sleep deprivation & trying to find that cup of coffee that I could swear I was drinking but cannot find it anymore, sorting laundry was becoming a little too stressful.
I grabbed my black sharpie pen and put a dot in the clothes according to the birth order of each kid. When that kid grew out of that particular pair of pants or shirt and was deemed ok enough to be passed down to the next kid, I would add another dot.
We have 4 kids with 2 years separating them as they were born. 3 boys & 1 girl. Now they are 13, 11, 9 & 7. Our daughter is the youngest & most of the clothes do not get passed down to her but there are a few that have made it like hoodie sweatshirts & pajamas. Obviously, this process has been the most helpful for the 3 boys.
The dots made sense to me instead of initials. Even though our kids have different initials for their first names, if I was using initials to keep track of what shirt belonged to what kid, the tags would be marked up with letters & that would drive me bonkers. Also, if the clothes made it through all the kids & we wanted to share the hand me downs with another family or donate them to a thrift shop, the labels would only have dots in them.
2. Write on the washer with a dry erase marker clothes you need to check for stains and/or you do not want to put in the dryer. I’d like to say I started doing this because someone else made the mistake of tossing my favorite shirt in the dryer before checking to see if the stain came out. After the hundredth time of doing this I started using sticky notes & placing them on the washer to help me remember to check the stain or to not put those jeans in the dryer. I finally switched to using a dry erase marker. This one has a magnet attached to it, so it can stick to the side of my washer. When I have an item I do not want to toss in the dryer, I write it on the lid. When that load is done, the little reminder is gone with a quick swipe of an eraser.
3. Stop turning socks from inside out
6 people. 1 pair of socks a day. 7 days in a week. That’s 84 socks. Sometimes it’s more because my oldest plays sports and he goes through a few pairs on the days he has practice or games. My husband is the only one in the family who takes his socks off intentionally so they come off the way he put them on. He’s a true example of how we all should be. The rest of us are just lazy. When the socks come out of the dryer, they get tossed in a clean sock bin. Inside out and free. Why fold them together if you’re just going to take them apart to put them on your feet?
You may be wondering if I put black dots on the kids socks? Nope. Sock companies have done that for me. Hanes, for example, has different colors for different sizes and now that the kids are older, they know what socks belong to them.
4. One quick fold & place in a basket for the kids to put away
Whoa! Won’t the clothes get all wrinkled? Maybe. If my kid wants to wear a wrinkly t-shirt because they failed to put their clothes away that day, I’m fine with that. Letting that “perfection” go has saved my sanity as a mom. If on the rare occasion my kids wear a collared shirt or dress clothes, I will hang those up for them because, this may shock some of you – I do not iron. The last time I ironed a shirt, I blew a fuse! That was my signal to stay away from the iron, right??
Were these tips helpful to you or are you stuck on the fact that I allow my kids to leave the house in wrinkled clothes & you think I’m a crazy person?
With each stage & season of life, things change. I’m sure as we grow into the next stage there will be other things that drive me crazy and make me reevaluate the system.
Next on my list – teaching my kids how to do their own laundry. Who has tips for that??
ellen says
The dry-erase marker step? I will be adopting that. Because maybe I shrunk a lovely jacket that I had been on the hunt to find and bought with my birthday money and now it fits Mary Des.
ellen recently posted..saturday.
caroline says
oh no! 🙁 {i wish i would have thought of this earlier in life!}
Lisa says
I have three boys who have a laundry basket each. When it fills up, they bring it down and do their own laundry. Then take said basket back up with them. We never mix their clothes. I do me and my husband’s laundry. They have a towel that is theirs and every few weeks they are instructed to strip the bed. They are masters of the whole process…if they want clean clothes, they have to wash their own. Mine are 16,15 and 11 but we started this years ago. Sometimes I might switch their load but then they take it up with them. Laundry is never a chore, except after trips.
caroline says
Lisa! you are my hero!
Mary Scine says
So wait – when did the folding happen? I’m great at starting laundry, moving it to the dryer – but then I have heaps and heaps of clean laundry staring me down… Folding is where I stall… :/
caroline says
when the clothes are dry all i do is fold them in half and put them in the basket. the kids put them away when the basket is full.
Shannon says
I do not iron, either!!! 🙂
caroline says
i have ironed twice in the past year but it was to put on an iron-on transfer for the kids when it was dr seuss day at school. {so glad that greg doesn’t normally wear shirts that require ironing! if he did, i’d probably take them to the cleaners…;)}
Linda@Creekside says
dots! dry erase markers! wow! where were you when I had little ones running around!
too cool!
fun to meet you today from Emily’s …
;-}
Linda@Creekside recently posted..Praising God . . . She’s 2 Years Sober
caroline says
thanks for stopping by Linda! pass it on to any friends with little ones 🙂
Rebekah {honeyandcheese} says
When we were kids, my mom made a magnet that said “Stop! Something in here can’t go in the dryer!” (I think the first one might have said “Hey you!”) That way WE would remember not to just toss the whole load in the dryer, and if our clothes got left in on someone else’s laundry day, they would stop and ask before shrinking someone’s favorite sweater. It worked 99.9% of the time and now that we’re grown, we all have magnets on our dryers. 🙂
Another one of her tricks (my mom is awesome) was to give each us a “sock bag.” This was just a mesh lingerie bag from the dollar store. Each one of ours had a different colored ribbon on it. We could hang them on the hamper and deposit dirty socks in there when we tossed in the rest of our clothes. When the laundry was done, each of us had a bag of clean socks – however we took them off. No matching, no turning, no wondering which socks belonged to which girl.
Rebekah {honeyandcheese} recently posted..So you don’t digiscrap?
caroline says
oh my gosh these are great ideas! your mom is awesome!