5.17 Method - Doing Laundry

Bestest Friend and I are doing a blog project. Each day we will write a blog post on a pre-determined theme chosen by a random noun generator. The theme for the seventeenth day of the month is "Method."

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Stephany and Sarah have both recently posted about how they do laundry. It is endlessly fascinating to see how people do different chores that we all have to do and it's even more fascinating to see how people with different size families do it (Stephany is a single lady and Sarah has FIVE children).  Here's how this couple does it.

This got long very quickly. TL;DR We wash our clothes once a week. 

I. Frequency

Generally speaking, we do laundry on Sundays. We might occasionally do a load in the middle of the week (this usually happens when we have five wet towels because someone rolled in scat and/or mud, but I won't name names about who rolls around in rabbit poop) or adjust the schedule if we're going to be traveling or something, but laundry is a Sunday chore.  We do it once a week because I only have enough workout clothes and undergarments to last about six or seven days, so if we don't do laundry on this schedule, bad things happen in my wardrobe! On average, we do three to seven loads a week. Now, this is a wide range because there are times of the year when we use more clothes than others.

In the winter, we do a lot less laundry because we don't wash our pants and shirts/sweaters with every wear and so it ends up mostly being socks, underwear, and towels and the loads are small. In the summer, heaven help us all, we change clothes all the damn time because we get sweaty, sunscreen-y, and there are times when I change four times in one day.

We wash our clothes, towels, and placemats every week. We wash our sheets every three to four weeks.  We wash our duvet cover hardly ever. There are certain items I handwash (bras, hats, scarves) and those get done on a very irregular basis when I feel like the situation is getting desperate. I probably don't need to tell you that bras get washed far more frequently in the summer than in the winter, do I?  Is this unusual? Too often? Not often enough? Who knows? It's just what we do.

This is my favorite basket. I like that it fits on my hips and makes carrying it up the stairs easier. My husband, however, literally has no hips and watching him carry this basket is HILARIOUSLY awkward.

(We were married for a couple of years before we combined our laundry. We used to do his and her laundry and never the twain met. We had separate laundry baskets, used separate coins since we didn't have washer/dryer in our unit back then, and even separate detergent! But when I broke my leg, Dr. BB temporarily took over all the laundry, threw everything into the same basket, and we've never gone back to separate laundry. It felt almost as momentous as when we got a joint banking account or bought a car together.)

II. System

A. Gather all the laundry and bring it to the downstairs bathroom. We keep laundry baskets in our bedroom, in the downstairs bathroom closet, and then we'll go around and collect towels from all the bathrooms and the kitchen and the mudroom where the vast majority of the time there's a towel or four that has been used to dry off a certain canine. Strip bed(s) if necessary. 

At this time, we have to REPLACE THE TOWELS in both the bathrooms. If we don't, inevitably one of us will use the upstairs bathroom and there won't be any way to dry hands. This replacing towels step must happen before anything touches a washer or dryer.

B. Separate into whites, darks, and colors. You people who don't separate your laundry are killing me. KILLING ME.  We don't have a strict order for which loads we wash, but if we are washing sheets, we do those first because then we can make the bed for dumping out the rest of the clothes to fold them. If we are planning on working out on Sunday, we might save the darks for last so we can throw in our workout clothes into a dark load. 

Some people wash all their towels in one load. We do not. We have dark grey towels (go in with the darks), white towels (go in with the whites), and colorful kitchen towels (go in with colors). If we put all the towels together, the white ones would immediately look dingy and, more importantly, our dryer could not handle an entire load of towels. They would just stay wet forever. When we first bought these towels, we washed them all at once and we literally had to line dry the towels because our dryer just couldn't take it. 

C. I hang dry the vast majority of my clothing. I put socks, underwear and some tshirts in the dryer, but otherwise line dry pants, dresses, shirts, bras, and workout gear. Dryers eat your clothes and I'm too frugal to spend money on things, so line drying it is. We have two of these drying racks and they are generally full to bursting on Sundays. We place these racks in our dining room, which is inconvenient to say the least. In my dream world in which we win the lottery, we have a designated laundry room with enough space for these racks. In the real world in which I don't buy lottery tickets, it just means the dining room is a bit cramped on Sunday nights.

D. When our dryer is finally done drying (we need a new one, but this one technically still works, even if it takes three times as long as it should, so we keep on keeping on), we take the clothes upstairs and dump them all on the bed while both of us fold and put away immediately.  On rare occasions when one of us is doing laundry solo, we fold the other person's clothes and put the folded items on the bed on their side. I don't honestly know which closet/dresser my husband keeps his socks and tshirts, so he has to put them away.  I love that we fold clothes together because it makes it go faster AND we always end up having weird philosophical discussion like "if you were one of these items of clothing, what would you like to be and why?". Marriage, man, it's insane.

E. On Monday morning, right after breakfast, I put away everything that's hanging on the racks. If something is still damp, the racks can remain up until after work hours, but we generally like to have those racks out of our dining room as soon as possible. 

III. Products

As you know, I have skin that freaks out if I try to change any product that touches my skin. There are  CONSEQUENCES Let's not ever talk about the time I briefly tried to use Palmolive instead of Dawn for washing dishes - never again.  So, we have used the exact same laundry products for over a decade. We once tried to change from the detergent we use to a "cleaner" detergent, but that experiment led to an emergency room visit, so now we just stay the course and hope to hell none of them ever changes their formula.

Detergent: Era - I have no idea why my skin is cool with this grocery store brand, but I am grateful because it's cheap and easy to find. Even at the height of supply chain issues in the pandemic, we could find it. My late MIL used Era and I think my husband and I take great comfort that on laundry day our house smells like hers used to.

Fabric softener: Bounce Free sheets - Honestly, most of my clothes don't get any fabric softener because I line dry so many of them.

Handwashing: Woolite Delicates - This does irritate my skin, so I have to be very diligent about rinsing these items incredibly thoroughly. I haven't really come up with a better system for handwashing delicate items, though.

Tennis balls: We have a three-pack of tennis balls that we use to wash things like coats, pillows, and the like. In particular, my down coats get washed with tennis balls in the dryer once or twice a season (and then line dried).  (I don't wash our pillows very much. I generally just replace them rather than wash them. Occasionally I throw them into the dryer to freshen them up with a dryer sheet. Is this weird? Should I wash our pillows?)

Mesh bags: I have a large number of mesh bags (maybe six?) that I use for things that get tangled with other things, particularly sports bras and camisoles. 

All right, let 'er rip. Tell me how wrong I am and what I'm doing wrong. I know there are strong opinions out there!