Conquering Mt. Washmore

Being a mom of many, I have definitely had my moments (OK, maybe years, not moments) of never being caught up on laundry; or, of having a permanent large pile of clean laundry on my bedroom floor. It never seemed to get folded and put away. We would just rummage through it when we needed something. But, the laundry was always out of control and it drove me nuts!! After much trial and error, I have come up with a solution that has been working well for over 10 years now.

Basically, I wash all the clothes twice a week. Monday and Thursday work best for me.  I don’t have kids wash their own clothes for a few reasons; although, they do help me when I need it. I don’t mind doing the laundry myself. As I do it, I can make sure the clothes are in good condition and pull out any torn or outgrown clothes, etc. I also don’t want to compete for time in the washing machine if others in the house are trying to do their own laundry. And, I don’t want people running tiny loads of laundry when I can fill up the washer.

We have several spots where we collect dirty clothes – one in the garage, where we keep all the younger kids’ clothes, one in the master bedroom and one in the kids’ bathroom upstairs. In the morning, I have the kids round up the dirty clothes and take them to the garage.  I sort them into piles by color. I know many people that don’t separate their colors, but I like to do my best to keep the colors from becoming muddy, hoping to be a good steward of the clothing God has given us. In the picture below, I have 5 piles of regular laundry. Behind those, I have a basket of cold water wash, which I usually only do once a week.

My laundry room isn’t very large and it has 2 doors and cupboards that open onto it, so keeping  anything on the floor in the laundry room doesn’t work well. Since my garage is just outside the laundry room, it’s a good place to sort the clothes. When a load comes out of the dryer, I take it back to the garage where I have an area set up for laundry.  The setup has varied over the years, depending on the space in the garage and on how many kids I am doing laundry for. This is our basic setup now. Each kid has a basket of their own, and I use one basket for my husband and me.

I set the basket of freshly cleaned clothes on the table and start sorting.  The upper shelf is for the older kids. The basket on the far left of that shelf is giveaways. So, when things are outgrown, they go into that basket. (I used to have a whole system for storing outgrown clothes to save them for the next child, but we don’t need that anymore.) My basket is on the left of the table. And, the younger kids’ baskets are under the table. I simply pull a piece of clothing out of basket and put it in the basket of the person who owns that item. If it goes in my basket, I fold it first. The blue basket on the floor in the picture is socks. I throw all socks in there and everyone finds their own. (Although, last week I did attempt sorting socks into each basket again. We’ll see if that lasts.)

Simple as that – as each basket comes from the laundry room, I sort it. I rarely let the baskets of clean clothes pile up. This way, when the kids say “Mom, have you seen my (insert specific item of clothing here)” I can either tell them I remember washing it and it’s in their clean clothes basket. Or, I might tell them it’s in a certain dirty clothes pile. And, of course, there are those times when I don’t know where their missing clothing is. (As a matter of fact, right now, two kids are looking for their rock climbing shirts in the dirty clothes pile.)

To help me sort clean clothes, each child is assigned a certain number of dots. For instance, my oldest daughter gets one dot put on the tag of her clothing. My second daughter gets two dots, and so on. One thing I would change to this system is that I would not do a 1, 2, 3 dot for the boys and a 1,2,3 dot for the girls, basically because, in my case, a boy/girl of similar size ends up with the same number of dots. Usually that’s not a problem, but when we get matching shirts from Sukkot or theater, it’s hard to tell whose is whose. But, we’re too far into the dot system to change it now.

As we get new clothes, we put on the dots before they enter the clothing collection. When clothing gets handed down from one child to the next, we just add a dot. Simple as that. And, it makes sorting laundry so much easier for me!

After the laundry is sorted, each person is in charge of putting away their own laundry. When my children were smaller, and we used the big kid/little kid buddy system, big kids were in charge of putting away their little buddy’s laundry or helping them put it away, depending on the age of the little buddy. But, since my littlest is 6, she is old enough to put away her own laundry. So, everyone does their own. This way, even when clean clothes haven’t been put away in a timely manner, we can still find what we need pretty easily.

In between clothes washing days, I wash towels, sheets and any other miscellaneous stuff that needs to be washed. And, I usually take the weekend off from laundry.