What are your laundry hacks?

[Greg]

Originally Posted by jdp

Am I missing the icon to edit posts or is there none?

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[mbhunter]

I used to just keep my clean clothes in the basket and pick out what I needed, but that doesn't fly anymore, now that I'm married.

We have dryer balls -- little rubbery blunt spikey things that agitate the clothes in the dryer a little better, and speed the drying time. This means the clothes last a little longer.

[NaturallyCheap]

Just water and sunlight!

[redsoxmaniac]

the reality is the Dryer is a huge expense. Even if you can only do it once or twice a week. Hang your wash outside if you have the space. Buy a retractable line and you will enjoy the wonderful smell of line dried clothes or sheets and towels. If you can persevere and hang up all your laundry you will save quite a bit of $$$$.

[khorrell]

I would love to hear more about the family closet idea. Sometimes I think that my laundry room already is a family closet, so why bother pretending that we keep the clothes in the bedrooms? Do you have separate dressers for each person, lined up in a row?

We are moving back into our old house that is blessed with an enormous laundry room. Of course, it is also the back entrance to the house, the mud room, and the furnace room, so it sees a lot of action. My children are terrible about keeping their clothes put away and I've been pretty ineffective at getting them to improve. Plus they share bedrooms and it would be nice to take the dressers out of the equation.

Another concern is that the laundry room is cold in the winter, so I'm not sure if that would fly...

Any insights would be helpful. I love moving into a house I've already lived in as I can make effective systematic changes!

[lucille]

Originally Posted by redsoxmaniac

the reality is the Dryer is a huge expense. Even if you can only do it once or twice a week. Hang your wash outside if you have the space. Buy a retractable line and you will enjoy the wonderful smell of line dried clothes or sheets and towels. If you can persevere and hang up all your laundry you will save quite a bit of $$$$.

We have many clothing items that have line dry on them. In the winter we have a clothes rack we use. Put them on hangers and then on the clothing rack. In the summer we use the gazebo frame on our deck to hang lighter weight clothes to dry. It is one of those metal framed garden gazebos that we have on our upper deck. So we hang t-shirts and that kind of thing on hangers and then hang the hangers on the horizontal track. It it on the 2nd floor of the house so nobody can get up there from outside and we get a good breeze all the time. This cuts our dryer use down to about 2 loads per week.

[GOTO Fashion]

I have a long countertop for folding/pressing clothes. I pull a load out of the dryer directly onto the countertop and start folding while the clothes are still warm. I try touch each item only once - it is folded or hung on a hanger immediately (I keep empty clothes hangers in a cabinet or spare laundry basket in the laundry room and hang clothes on one of two racks on my wall from IKEA (LOGGA hat racks)).

I have a press iron (this type of iron is a HUGE timesaver itself!) and I turn it on when I find something that needs pressing. Any additional items in need of ironing are added to the pile while I finish folding/hanging everything else. Once all the other clothes are folded and hung, I press all of the items that need pressing (usually 5 items or less per load) and hang those items, too.

Once all of the loads are finished, I stack the items in a hamper, sorted by rooms, and lay hanging items over the top. I go from room to room putting everything away and store the laundry basket back in the laundry room for future use.

By doing loads back-to-back, you can save time and money because the dryer and the press iron don't take as much time or electricity to heat up for the second and subsequent loads.

[kav122]

found a great post on this subject, most of it already covered, but though it would be nice to share:

http://unclutterer.com/2007/05/16/re...laundry-chaos/

[GOTO Fashion]

Kav122 - thanks for the article! A lot of her suggestions make sense (i.e., keeping a donation bag in the laundry room (I already do this for orphan socks and go through it about every 2 months).

I also liked her comment on not pre-sorting using three separate bins. We use one bin for my husband, the baby, and me. When the bin is filled to capacity, it's time to do laundry. Together with the week's towels, I have enough for one load each of colors, whites, and baby clothes.

[fasteddie]

My hamper is the same size as the capacity for my washer, when my hamper gets full, I do a load, one load takes like 3 minutes to fold and put away, so as long as I don't forget I started a load, laundry isn't even a burden.