Need a new laundry method

amother

Wed, Sep 30 2020, 11:35 pm

zaq wrote:

I don’t understand. Do one or two or three loads every day. Teach your kids to do their own. Seems self-evident. What am I missing here?

I don't have time to do.more than 1 load a day, which is not enough for what we need. The folding and getting everything back into drawers (for the ones who are too young plus mine and my husband) is the hard part.

amother

Bisque

Wed, Sep 30 2020, 11:56 pm

Laundry is my least bad chore. It’s not like I have to beat my sheets on a rock by the river or cook them with sliced lemons stirred with a broom handle in a giant kettle on the fire like they did on the prairie. The machine does most of the work.

My machine is small. Sheets and pillowcases for two twin beds OR six bath towels is the max it can hold. I do at least one load a day, sometimes two. I don’t have a dryer so I air dry. Shirts get hung up on hangers and dry that way so there’s no folding. If I’m too rushed to fold things as I take them off the rack, I drop them in a laundry basket, but usually I fold as I take down. It’s never that much because there’s no room to hang more than two loads at a time. Most things I fold in the air as I’m taking them down. Only a few things need to be laid flat on a surface to fold.

Not everything needs to be folded like in a store or at all. Relatively small-footprint things that you have a lot of like underpants can just be laid flat in a pile, or folded just in half or quarters and stacked. If you buy each person multiples of identical socks—one person gets white, another brown or black or blue or grey—you can just cram each person’s socks in a little box or bin and not fold them.

Invest in a bunch of Zippered mesh bags. Have separate bags for each person and put their socks in one, underpants in another, undershirts in a third and so on. This will streamline folding because you won’t have a snake’s best to unravel when you take the laundry out of the machine. You’ll have all the socks together to fold or dump as you prefer; all the underpants to stack like pancakes. Even if all you do is drop it in a laundry basket and deliver to the owner to fold, you will have cut your work in half.