This past week, we had an interesting week here in Houston, with Hurricane Nicholas coming through. Thank God we were all safe and sound, but we woke up to see our neighbour’s tree uprooted and ending up in our backyard! The kids had a fun time around the tree, gathering acorns, and studying its anatomy. We can all now claim to have touched the top of a large tree! 🙂
I was inspired to write this post when I learned that there are so many people who struggle with laundry and mention that they have mountains of clothes to be washed, and put away. I was even surprised to know that a lot of people reserve one day of the week for doing laundry and do it only that day! Laundry is an inevitable task that needs to be done in every household. So I wanted to write a post on how we do laundry relatively effortlessly, despite being a large family of 11. My system of laundry hardly takes any time, that I don’t even consider it a big ‘chore’. lol!
Well, first of all, in a large family, there is no option to do laundry once a week; as it will be a planet-ful of clothes to launder! Despite doing laundry daily, we still have about 1-3 loads daily, depending.
Usually whenever the youngest child outgrows the crib, it becomes the dump ground for clean laundry in our house. Upto the recent past, I have been guilty of letting upto 7-8 loads of washed clothes pile up in the crib before I put it away. But I’m able to put away the 7-8 piles in about 10-12 minutes!
I would love to share my system with you!
Disclaimer: If you are still the strong type A personality who wants things done in certain ways, unfortunately this method may not work for you. 😔
Those who are ready to experiment, here you go!
Some basic things up front:
1)We do laundry pretty much every day. For the daily routine clothes, we divide clothes mostly into ‘regular’ clothes, as well as ‘whites and light delicates’. If there are dark delicates, we run it separately.
Linen, sheets, kitchen towels, bath towels, any special clothes, and rugs are washed as needed, separately, throughout the week.It’s because of these extra items it ends up sometimes more than 1-2 loads a day.
2)Kids are integral to transferring laundry and helping put away.
3) We do not fold laundry. We have a drawer/bin system. We also hang clothes. The only routine clothes we pretty much hang on a daily basis are my husband’s clothes(and mine that I do separately). Despite using drawers, we end up needing to iron the daily-wear clothes only very occasionally, as we usually get the ‘wrinkle free’ type clothes. We do however regularly iron the church clothes and my husbands clothes that he wears to work.
4) I keep all the currently using kids clothes, except the oldest 2, in our master bedroom in drawers or fabric bins.
5) So far, we do everyone’s laundry together. It’s just easier in a large family, instead of taking up space for different hampers for everyone. (My daughter likes to do hers separately.)
This is how we used to do laundry upto 6 months ago:
Due to limited number of drawers, I used to combine 2 kid’s clothes together, of a particular type of cloth (Example the 6 year old and 8 year old who have overlapping sizes, got one common drawer for going shirts, another for going pants/shorts, and another for staying clothes.) So, when putting clothes in drawers, I didn’t need to waste time figuring out exactly whose cloth it is.
I only have a certain number of clothes for the season and age, out at a time, in the master bedroom. The rest are up in the kids room. Usually I keep about 5 -6 pairs of going clothes, 6-7 pairs of sports type clothes and 6-7 pairs of staying clothes downstairs.
(As the master bedroom is downstairs, and kids rooms are upstairs, I like to keep all the younger kids clothes in the master bedroom, as it makes it so much easier to pull out everyone’s clothes when we need to head out, and will save me the effort of running up and down. Plus it can save me the battle of sorting out their clothes from the toy mess upstairs!. Plus I don’t want it to mix up with the off season clothes which are usually stored in their room).
Method:
So basically, we do a laundry check every morning, noon and evening to see what needs to be put in or transferred and then keep the flow going. There is one kid designated for laundry (which they rotate through with some other chores every 2-3 months). This kid will be the one in charge of transferring and turning on the machines.
After the loads are done, they are all taken to the master bedroom which is the central hub. If we don’t get to put it away by bedtime, I dump it into the crib. Once there are a few loads, I dump everything onto the bed. Key to rapidly sorting is to take out the bulkier clothes first, and hence reducing the pile to almost half instantly. This includes any bathroom towels, and my husbands clothes. (Husband’s clothes are taken to his closet, kept in a bin there until one of the designated kids put them away). The remaining pile is very easily manageable, and I rapidly sort them into the drawer categories, which take less than 4 minutes.
Then I call in 2 kids, whoever is around at the time. (Of course everyone starts running away soon as they spot me sorting the clothes😜). I throw the piles to them from the bed in a basketball fashion, and they put away in the drawers. And voila! We are done!
How we do it now, is even easier:
Very recently, I started using more of fabric bins like these.(affil link). So there is enough bins/drawers for each child to have their own. So each child gets their own bin for staying clothes, going clothes and sports clothes each. So after 1-2 loads, I do my part of taking out all the clothes that are not the kids; and then call them in to put away their own clothes into their own bins. So no more basketball- they just pick up their own clothes from the bed. Easier for me! 🙂
After everyone comes in, puts their clothes away and leave, there’s usually some more clothes on the bed, that they may have missed. I just scare them that the rest of the clothes on the bed that are unclaimed go for donation, and they run back and put them away. 😁
The clothes do get wrinkled a little more than when you fold and put away. But since we generally buy the wrinkle free T- shirts , we haven’t had major problems yet in terms of having to iron the daily-wear clothes frequently.
So far this system has been working very great for us!
For those who have their own laundry system that’s working for you, by all means; don’t change anything! Just throwing this out for those who are drowning in laundry:).
I would love to hear from anyone any tips you have to share on laundry!
Happy laundering!