Last month I read a fairly compelling blog post about one woman’s journey through the “40 Bags in 40 Days” challenge and I was inspired. I promptly compiled my own list of little projects I wanted to tackle and got to work. Originally it was my goal to complete one item on the list each weekday, skipping the days we are out of town for interviews and holidays. Naturally I’m pretty sure I am at least 2 weeks behind by now…bah.
Anyway…on to the topic of laundry. One of my 40 items is to clean out the laundry room cabinets and create a better laundry system/schedule.
Have I cleaned out those cabinets? Nope. But I HAVE finalized a far better laundry system. Let me first describe my *typical* laundry schedule…
Monday – laundry piles up
Tuesday – laundry piles up
Wednesday – same
Thursday – again
Friday – laundry is now spilling over the top of all 4 hampers in our house
Saturday – it’s the weekend – who wants to be stuck at home doing laundry?!
Sunday – eh. tomorrow is Monday. I have zero energy.
…
The following Monday – CRAP! I need to do LAUNDRY!!! (And so begins the 8+ loads of laundry for every member of my household).
As you can see, this is a pitiful “routine,” if you can even call it that. But I am recognizing that I CAN change it. I hate doing laundry, folding clothes, and putting them away, and that is why I have decided to do a load of laundry every. single. day.
Lunacy! Right?! Wrong. I have a distinct work style where if I want to be efficient and productive at all, I really don’t tolerate spending my time “cramming” and doing hours and hours of one activity (like laundry…or studying for a test…etc). Jake has always been the opposite…waiting until a couple days before a test or project was due and then spending his entire day (and sometimes night) on that one thing. I, on the other hand, did a max of about 15-20min of studying/work in each subject every day and really limited all school related study to 2 hours or less per day. Perhaps it is a short attention span. Who knows.
Back to laundry. I read about a mom who has 3 little ones like me and how she decided to do one single load of laundry each day. Every evening she would go around collecting the dirty clothes from each room. She would keep laundry hampers/baskets only in her laundry area (in this case it was her basement) and not in the bedrooms.
Once she got all of the clothes gathered, she separated whites and colors. In her case, and mine, she has to wait a few days to get enough of the whites to do a real load, so she’ll keep those in a hamper by the laundry room. In the morning she throws a load in the washer and then in the afternoon she switches it to the dryer. Because her kids are like mine, this mom waits to fold and put away until post kid bedtime.
I can officially say I am in Day 2 of this new load a day laundry system…and I’m really liking it. Well. I mean it’s laundry, so I’m not technically “liking” it so much as not wanting to poke daggers in my eyes by doing half a dozen loads at a time now.
