easy steps to take control of your laundry situation

Written by: Hannah West

Do you need to take control of your laundry situation?  Most time-consuming household chores like vacuuming, dusting, and cleaning out the fridge can stand to be done as seldom as once a week. But there’s one chore that seems to haunt you morning, noon, and night: laundry. Any time you attack the laundry situation, the piles only seem to mount higher. If your house constantly looks like it was ransacked by thieves, you’re probably pretty desperate for solutions. The good news? There are plenty of ways to laundry a less time-consuming and chaotic part of your life.

Get Your Laundry Room in Order

If you take a look around your house right now, the laundry room is probably the space with the most clutter–second only to the kitchen or playroom. The laundry room is often the place where you and your family first unburden yourselves after a long day, which means it’s usually home to shoes, backpacks, and lunchboxes on top of the usual clutter of cleaning supplies and extra doo-dads like light bulbs and tools. If you’re bringing chaos into an already entropic room, even a chore as simple and easy as laundry will start to feel stressful.

After straightening out the everyday mess by finding solutions like cubbies and hooks for each member of the family, it will be easier to use the laundry room for what it’s actually intended. And while you’re at it, try to centralize your laundry tasks in that room. Rather than having hampers scattered around the house, place the hampers in the laundry room and encourage your family to bring their clothes there. That will keep you from facing a mountain of dirty laundry that you didn’t know existed because it was hidden in three or four separate closets. If your space is small, use vertical storage like wall-mounted shelves and caddies.

Pre-Sort Your Items

But don’t just set up hampers in the laundry room without a system. Use them to minimize your laundry tasks. By labeling the hampers “colors,” “whites,” and “delicates,” or whatever suits your laundry system, you can squeeze the work into one-second blips rather than a thirty-minute chunk of your day. To make things even easier, your family will do most of the sorting for you when they put their clothes in the hampers.

You could also take a look at using something like this industrial laundry service, if you are a family who has people working in that sort of industry. It makes doing your laundry so much easier, as most people don’t really want to clean that type of clothes themselves.

Dive into Distractions

Folding laundry may be one of the most mundane home tasks, but that’s the aspect that can actually make it enjoyable. It’s mindless enough that you can turn on the TV, grab a cup of coffee, and relax if you have the time. Unlike scrubbing the bathtub, doing laundry can give you a chance to interact with your family while you’re in the midst of doing it. Since you find yourself doing laundry so frequently, make it the most relaxing experience you can make it–you may even start to enjoy it.

Use Certain Items More than Once

If you’re only using your bath towels once and throwing them in the wash, your laundry situation is probably not the only thing out of control. To save on utility bills, conserve a little water, and prevent loads from mounting up like anthills every single day, think about re-wearing items like pajamas and bras and re-using towels. Most fabrics are better off not being washed after every use anyway! Hang hooks in the bathroom instead of towel racks so that each used towel is fully dried by the time you’re ready to use it next and won’t need a wash.

Hannah West is a soon-to-be published Young Adult author based in Dallas, TX. She specializes in fiction but enjoys dabbling in diverse writing projects such as this article. For more tips like these visit: Modernize.com.