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Tips for Lessening Your Laundry Load

Upfront confession, y'all. I LOATHE LAUNDRY. Ask my husband, who ran out of socks this morning. I hate every single last thing about laundry, except for reading about ways to improve this horrendous experience in hopes that I will actually implement them. Laundry tips are actually a pretty hot topic on the interwebs these days, as I have seen several other blog posts about laundry tips, which I will be including within this post because that is how I roll.

But before I do that, let me share with you my plan for lessening my laundry load. You see, I feel like laundry is to a housewife (or househusband) as diet is to a fitness person. It's the thing you can't fake. You can sweep stuff under the rug, dump a bunch of toys into a cabinet in the living room or spray febreeze on the carpets to fake a put together house. (No judgment, I have done ALL of these things and more) But you can't really fake laundry. The clothes are either clean or they aren't. (I will spare my febreeze/lysol spray on my pants stories for now because it doesn't help my case!) Just to finish my analogy, this is much like a fitness person with the diet. You can't work out, take your supplements and fake the diet part and still expect a good result. You can't fake eating right. But I am clearly not an expert on that subject.



So, here are my go-to rules for lessening my loads of laundry. Some may work for you, and some may not, but nonetheless, this is what works for me when I actually apply it.

1. Do that mess everyday. Instead of letting it pile up, do a load every day. Usually it looks like this: at the end of the day, I will put everyone's clothes into a load after they have changed into their jammies. This usually requires moving clothes from the washer to the dryer, and if the dryer has clothes in it, I fold and put away those clothes before I go melt into the couch to do nothing until bed. Then, in the morning (or before I go to bed if the timing is right), I will put the clothes in the dryer and fold/put away those clothes if time allows. If time does NOT allow, I put the clothes on my bed so I am unable to go to bed(or take a nap) until those clothes have been put away. The thing about doing it daily is that this keeps the loads small and manageable. We have ALL had those monster-sized laundry loads that take like 3 drying cycles to dry. Guilty as charged.

2.  Don't have so many clothes!! <--- says the pregnant nesting lady who has recently donated 2/3rds of her household. Seriously. My husband told me this morning that he was out of socks. I open his sock drawer to an almost full drawer of socks. It was shared with me at this time that those socks are no longer desirable socks. Then they gots to go, ok??? As far as clothes are concerned, the less there ARE of things to wash, the easier it will be. Also it will be a nice indicator when you seriously need to do the laundry and more of a motivator to keep on top of things. The days of shoving clean clothes into full drawers and full closets need to be over.

3. Decorate/organize your space. It makes me laugh because I got some major smack-talking in the comments of my blog for including this in my list of How to be a Housewive (Without Feeling Like a Slave) but it's TRUE! There are so many cute printables and organization ideas for the laundry room out there. I will find my favorite ones and link them below. Am I the only one that loves to be amongst pretty and organized surroundings? If you are still reading this blog, then I think I am not alone. I am pretty sure there are others like me. I'd rather be in an organized and pretty laundry room and have a functional system for organizing laundry amongst the house, then be dealing with dirty clothes all over the place and doing laundry in an ugly, nasty laundry room.

4. Have one main laundry hamper in the laundry room. Make it the responsibility of the clothes wearer to deposit their dirty clothes into that main laundry room hamper, be it directly from their bodies, a smaller hamper in the bathroom or their room, or however long it hangs out on the floor. This one didn't make sense to me at first, but after experience after experience of hauling huge piles of laundry from a bedroom or bathroom hamper to the laundry room, dropping crap on the floor along the entire way, it just makes sense. It also keeps all the laundry stuff in the laundry room. It makes sense.

5. Simplify the folding/putting away process. For us, I have stopped hanging up my babies clothes. That is what her drawers are for. Additionally, I try to limit the amount of clothes that I have to hang. Folding and putting away is easier for me for some reason. This is a personal preference I guess. I have also read of each family member having a little bin that their folded clothes sit in, but in my household I don't think that would work. I can imagine those items never making it to their final destinations. I have also read another idea about having your like-sized children wear the same types of socks, so there are literally only one kind of sock, so you don't have to put them together in pairs. My kids are too different in size for this to work, but I do like this idea.

I guess the main thing to take home here is that if you hate laundry like me, the best thing to do is to just deal with it daily. Otherwise you will be spending your Sunday doing laundry all day and hating life (except I stopped doing it to write this blog post, OOPS).

Now to share some wonderful blog posts I have found surrounding my favorite subject of LAUNDRY:
The Laundry System that Changed my Life by I Think We Could Be Friends - this blog post is the one that talks about bins and about having the same kind of socks! This one is definitely legit and motivating, check it out!
15 Organizational Hacks That'll Make You Like Doing Laundry by Brit+Co - this one has a bunch of seriously cute organizational ideas that make me excited to move into our new house and revamp our (my) laundry room!
31 Ingenious Ways to Make Doing Laundry Easier by BuzzFeed - this is a combination of organizational ideas and strategies to make laundry easier.
4 Laundry Rules You Should Break by the Latina Homemaker - this is also a great list, and a great blog to read in general - this chic is legit!



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