Friday, March 17, 2023

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!

24 comments:

  1. I almost never wash bras. Sports bras FOR SURE EVERY TIME I WEAR THEM, but my actual underwire bras? Not too often. I need ore mesh bags, I think. When we were first living in Madison, someone stole my mesh bag of really expensive lingerie out of the apartment complex washer, and I sort of went off mesh bags, which is not a rational reaction.

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    1. I never put my underwire bags in the washer and I handwash them, so I don't wash them very often, either. I guess in the summer, they end up getting washed more often because they get smelly quickly, but that's sort of an anomaly.

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  2. Perhaps your dryer vent is plugged up outside. That might be making it take so long to dry. It's worth checking.

    I continue to do separate laundry for my husband and me. He used to do his own, but once I retired, it seemed selfish not to do his. Laundry is another housewifey chore I dislike. Why do I keep having to change from one machine to another in the middle? Where is the all-in-one laundry machine? This is 2023, for heaven's sake! Far past time for a Washer-Dryer single unit.

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    1. Ooohhhh...I've never considered an all-in-one laundry machine. I guess the washing and drying are just so different I never imagined technology that would be able to switch to such different tasks! What an idea!

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    2. This exists in Europe! My brother had a washer/dryer combo at his apartment in Copenhagen and I think they're relatively standard across Europe?! While it's a great idea, I found that the dryer took FOREVER and the clothes often smelled a bit musty at the end?

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  3. I would say you're doing just about everything right, although I'm one of those people who don't sort and washes everything together. But I do hang a lot of my clothes to dry- I have a drying rack like yours, and a vast majority of my clothes and my daughter's get hung to dry. With my snazzy new dryer, I can definitely wash whole loads of towels! And, I use Hex detergent. Our workout clothes were getting a funny odor (even after being washed) and this detergent solved the problem.

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    1. Occasionally I wish we could switch detergents and hearing about this Hex detergent is one of those times. Exercise clothes are so hard to clean with their heavy poly content!

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  4. I had one of those baskets! Yes, you need hips for them work as intended.

    This is where I confess that my mother does the laundry in our household. She has always enjoyed doing it; in college, she was volunteering to do it for friends (they provided the dimes for the machines). That said, when I was doing my own, I did separate by colors, but I always did towels as a load on their own, never in with clothes. I would hang unders and socks up to dry, but mostly used the dryer to get clothes down to just damp and then hang them. (My mother is much less of a dryer user, and hangs almost everything.) And I found Tide to be the best for cleaning without looking dingy, and used the mountain spring scent, which I found pleasant. Mom is a what's-on-sale detergent chooser (we're lucky not to have the issues you have to deal with), so the scent changes frequently. I find it a little disconcerting.

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    1. I dream of using Tide. It's so effective. Alas. I'm a tiny bit jealous that your mom does all the laundry, but I guess I wouldn't want to live with my mom, so I'm not sure the trade-off would be worth it to me!

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  5. Is there a wrong or right? I think it's whatever works for you. I do all mine in a cool/warm cycle and pull out any lycra/bra/bike clothes/swimsuits before putting them in a medium heat dryer till all dry with a dryer sheet. I don't know if that's good or bad but it works for me so -- that's what I do!

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    1. Since I have strong opinions about separating, I would say YES there is a right or wrong! I mean, of course, if it works for you, it's fine. :)

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  6. We're still at the "separate laundry" stage of our relationship. Like you, I do laundry on a fixed schedule so that I never run out of clean clothes. The Love of My Life likes to live dangerously and do laundry whenever.

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    1. Awwwww...you still have separate laundry! That's so sweet. How long have you been married?

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  7. I have strong opinions about some stupid things, but not about how other people do their laundry. It's adorable that you fold laundry together. I guess I should do my post now before the Laundry Post Zeitgeist has passed me by.

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    1. I have strong opinions on just about everything, so I guess it's not too surprising that I have strong feelings on laundry.

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  8. Without going into detail, or even knowing the detail, Sue does the laundry on the weekend.

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    1. What would you do without Sue?! Ha. My husband could do his own laundry, but I'm pretty sure he wouldn't do it as regularly if left to his own devices.

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  9. I'm one of those crazy people who tosses everything in at once with almost ZERO sorting. My husband washes his own business attire and sometimes separates out whites/darks in that because dress shirts need to stay in good shape. I will say that almost all our clothes are dark, mostly for the reason that it makes laundry so much easier. But I would wash a light towel with a pair of (already washed many times) blue jeans - even on a hot cycle - and never think twice about it!
    I hang all our wool socks, some workout gear, my makeup removal washcloth and some other items to dry. For the most, part, though, I dry things on an auto-sense low-heat setting on the dryer.

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    1. I honestly don't know if I've ever used a warm or hot cycle in my entire life! I DO dry all my wool socks in the dryer. Ha! What opposite approaches we have.

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  10. I love that you are so adamant about separating things. I have definitely had a few pink pairs of undies in my day, but now my clothes are all so old that nothing even leaks colors anymore, so I do them all together. Also, I never use hot; I always use the "tap cold" temperature for all of my loads (unless it is a nasty pillow, which by the way I do wash, but you can only do one at a time or they will never dry and then you will be back to square one). I also use a capful of bleach in every load, as long as it does not contain work clothes. I hang all of my work clothes, any sweaters, and any lightweight workout clothes since they dry fast, but we have pretty humid weather so if I try to hang dry something too heavy, I end up smelling slightly moldy.

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  11. This was fun to read! I love those drying racks. The only clothes I do not use the dryer for are shirts because they can shrink so quickly in the dryer, so I usually just hang them on hangers in my closet, which works. Now, I don't mind my pants shrinking because that means they will fit me better lengthwise, haha. #shortpeopleprobs

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  12. I used to be obsessed with my laundry situation. I've lightened up a bit in my older age...thank goodness, because it's JUST laundry, Suzanne.
    I do sort ours with lights/darks. Most of my stuff get's hung up or I dry them on low (workout stuff, sports bras, my delicates)
    My husband has always pulled more weight 'outside the house', so I've always done all the laundry. If I'm away, he can figure it out though, he's not hopeless. I do laundry at least 5 times a week as I don't like it to pile up. I've not washed my pillows, but I use pillow protectors AND cases, and those get washed weekly with our sheets. Most everything gets washed in cold water aside from sheets/towels and I love having white sheets/towels because a little bleach perks them up.
    I put everything away myself and it made me smile to picture the two of you folding together. :)
    I'm so thankful that I can use whatever detergents/softners as we're not sensitive. Poor you!

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  13. This is so fascinating to read... I enjoy to hear how other people do all the menial household chores. I am definitely "team sorting" and like you, we mostly hang up clothes to dry... just socks/underwear and some odd other items (like towels, sheets) go in the dryer.
    I really wish the washers here had a HOT program. Whites always become grey in an instant, even if I use bleach. It's so frustrating.

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  14. Holy cannoli, you have an intensive laundry routine! I... dry everything. Don't sort. Use the free & clear detergent. No dryer sheets. I don't handwash anything (then again, I buy the World's Cheapest Bras and wear them til they fall apart, so...). I don't use the hot water either, though, and only use warm for my workout clothes because otherwise that detergent (a sport-specific free & clear) doesn't dissolve properly. So I do warm-ish. :)

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