It was 2:48. I needed to be at my kid’s school by 3:00. The school is five minutes away.
It was officially an awkward pause in my day. What could I possibly accomplish in seven minutes?
But it was a Monday, and Monday is Laundry Day. And I was rocking Laundry Day on that particular Monday.
Really. When Laundry Day is consistent and I’m really, truly only doing seven days’ worth of clothing for my family of five, I do five loads. Two darks (nice stuff; t-shirts/workout stuff), one whites, one lights, and jeans/dark towels.
If I can put in a load early enough on Sunday night that I can move it to the dryer and put a second load in the washing machine before I go to bed, I’m shocked at how fast I move through Laundry Day on Monday.
My final load of the day had just finished drying. If . . . IF . . . I could get that load folded (straight out the dryer since that method makes laundry magically disappear instead of creating a wrinkly mountain in my living room), I’d be done. Done before 3 p.m. y’all. That’s big.
So I tried.
Even if I didn’t finish before I needed to leave, I’d be five more minutes down the road to Laundry Success.
I’d be proud of myself for not wasting that particular Awkward Pause.
I made it. Here’s proof. I didn’t get it put away, but I matched and “folded” an entire load of (not bright) whites. And y’all, that’s the load I hate folding straight out of the dryer the very most!
2:53, and Laundry Day was done. Except for the putting away of that very very last load, but still.
Go me.
Have you tried Laundry Day? Have you joined the (totally unofficial, dues-free) club? I encourage you to try it. It is THE best way I’ve found to keep laundry under control for my ADD, project-focused-mundane-task-resistant brain.
Here’s the long version of how I came to figure out that it’s the best way for me. (Including links to the many other methods I tried that were miserable failures.)
*FYI, Laundry Day probably won’t work for you if you’re on a septic system, as it may overload your system. Sorry!
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i am interested about sheets…. when do you wash sheets? when you change beds or on laundry day?
just wondering, since sheets don’t appear in your five load list….
Sheets I usually do on another non-Laundry Day. When the washer is “free” every other day, it somehow is mentally easier for me to run a load. I’ll also add them in as an extra load if they’re there in the laundry pile.
I have the same question about sheets. Our current plan is whenever they get really gross or someone wets the bed or vomits. I feel that perhaps I should have a more exact plan for that. 🙂
I used my awkward pause this morning (thanks for the reminder) to pack rain gear for our trip to the Texas beach. Because what else would be better for a beach vacation than rain boots & umbrellas?
Sheets I usually do on another non-Laundry Day. When the washer is “free” every other day, it somehow is mentally easier for me to run a load. I’ll also add them in as an extra load if they’re there in the laundry pile.
I do someone’s sheets every weekend. Strip the bed in the AM–washed and remade before bedtime.
Due to lack of a dishwasher I try to use an awkward pause to either put dishes in the sink/wash the ones sitting in soapy water/put dry ones away.
Hope you are staying dry. TV here in Australia has sections of Texas under water. Officials telling people not to drive on flooded roads.
Nony is in a northern region of Texas, so she ought to be safe. 🙂
And, I agree about awkward pauses and dishes. You can get a lot done in just 5 or 10 minutes when it comes to dishes.
Thanks so much for your concern! It has been crazy around here, with more rain all the time. There has been flash flooding, but nothing as severe where we are as it is in the areas you’re likely seeing. But everything is on the brink of overflowing, it seems!
Pleased to hear. As per the poem
http://www.dorotheamackellar.com.au/archive/mycountry.htm Australia is a land of drought and flooding rains. Hopefully it is mild in your area. If floods are forecast putting drinkable water in some containers or just filling the bath can be good in case water supply is briefly contaminated due to things overflowing.
Hi Nony,
I’m a Laundry Day convert as of last Fall. It has been a game-changer as you assured us all it would be. Today, though, is THE LAST DAY OF SCHOOL (hooray!?). Anyway, how does LD work in the summer with your children home? Right now I’m envisioning a situation in which my kids are pining to leave the house while I’m telling them we can’t go anywhere or Mom will lose her tenuous grip on the laundry and thus on a meaningful piece of her sanity. I’d appreciate your advice.
If you know you’ll be in and out on Laundry Day, try to get those two loads done the night before, and then make it a family affair to get loads folded and put away as quickly possible during awkward pauses. And remember that even if Laundry Day lasts two days, it’s okay!
I am still resisting folding from the dryer. My current excuse is that the pantry (where the dryer is) is too small. There is probably plenty of room in there if I try though. I just reeeaalllyyy don’t want to do it!!
Any tips/ideas for tackling laundry mountain without a dryer? It feels like there’s a never ending cycle of all our things being dirty -> clean but damp -> dry and should really be put away but hasn’t been -> used and now it’s dirty again.
Sounds like the only spot in that cycle that can be changed is the putting away. (Sorry!! I despise putting away too!) I know it was a game changer for me to start folding and putting away straight out of the dryer. It isn’t as convenient for you by any means since you have that in-between step of having to let it dry. My main advice on tackling a problem is to tackle it every day (or every week) until you figure out what works for you in your unique home.
Don’t know if this will help any, but when I had no dryer, I would wash several loads of laundry at home, then take them to a laundromat to dry them all…
I used to fold things right off the line (used to = when I had one). For towels and sheets, this was easy; remove clips from each item one at a time, fold the big stuff first, then down to the smallest, so it stacks nicely. Take inside, put directly away. For clothes, this was more difficult; 2 adults, 2 kids, and we washed by color not by person like I do now. I usually would hang one person’s laundry all together, and 4 lines = 4 people made that easy. It also made folding easy, because I hung all the heavy (big) stuff toward the support ends and the small stuff (underwear, socks) in the middle to avoid clothes dragging in the dirt from the line sagging. So, once dry, just starting at one end and going down the line meant everyone got a nice stack of clothes with their socks & undies sandwiched in the middle, or else everyone just got a whole basket to themselves of the entire day’s laundry with their socks & undies down one side. If they chose not to put their clothes away, that was really their own problem. I’d just dump their clean clothes on their bed the next time I had to harvest baskets for laundry day.
I just recently switched to laundry day. After 13 years of my husband and I trying to do the whole load a day thing, and always always failing, I thought, what the heck, it can’t be any worse than the current situation. So we switched about a month ago. I now do laundry on Fridays, and it’s been amazing. I admit, I haven’t mastered the whole putting it away part yet. But knowing that all our clothes are clean, even if they are still in a pile, has been so freeing!and never doing the hunt for a particular item worn weeks ago, not knowing it its hiding in the clean or dirty pile? Fantastic. My husband occasionally has to do a midweek load of his pants, but that is entirely on him, and doesn’t mess up my rhythm. I am fully on board with laundry day!
I love hearing this!
We don’t have laundry day, and I don’t think we’ll be able to for a couple more years. Both of our kids are in cloth diapers, and our stash is only big enough to go two days without doing a load. Adding on top of that the fact that we don’t have a dryer (and there are five people in our house and limited drying space), I can’t see it working out for us…
the dryer is a hurdle, but i did two kids in cloth with a regular laundry day. i just didn’t count diapers as regular laundry. same way Dana says she does sheets or towels on “non-laundry” days. 🙂 i have recently come around to a multiple day schedule that works better for me though (see my comment below) 🙂
Excellent! I so want to start this. I have not been able to make laundry work for about 12 years. It dawned on me the other day that laundry hasn’t worked for me since we got a front loader machine 12 years ago. I thought it was all my health issues, but I had health issues before, too. I am hoping to try a regular top loader again combined with laundry day and have a hunch it may be a miracle around here.
you didn’t need to convince me. i’ve always done a one-day laundry day. it’s how i was raised. in the clutter-filled, never clean house that i grew up in, the one always constant thing was Laundry Day. We never had to worry if there were clean undies or enough socks or if the favorite dress that was worn on friday could be worn again next tuesday. And then….. i had 3 kids. (i know you have three kids too) but we also do cloth diapers. So that’s at least 3 more loads a week. plus i wear a uniform for work, and hubby is a mechanic, and i recently decided to try to keep my nice stuff *nice* by doing a load of “delicates” (when i grew up, there was no such thing as “delicate” white undies got washed with whites, dark undies got washed with darks, and everything inbetween got washed with colors and ho hum and la dee dah if something shrank or got torn in the dryer) So there’s at least three, if not four loads of laundry just between me and my husband. I was washing kids clothes separately for three reasons 1) they often need extra stain treatments, 2) a universal load of lights would have to be split in 2 just to fit in the washer anyway, and 3) it makes putting away easier if i can just say “here this basket belongs in the kids’ room”… so that’s another 2-3 loads for the kids. plus i was doing a load of diapers every 2-3 days, which, in case you didn’t know, requires pre-washes and extra rinses, so it takes as long, by itself, as doing 3 separate loads (and i’m doing that three times a week)…. and every so often Diaper Day would fall on Laundry Day…. and at that point, the world would collapse. I calculated out, for three laundry days in a row, I was trying to wash 10 loads of laundry in a day, and one of those loads was the Monster Diaper load. It was never getting done, and i was tearing my hair out. So I had to come up with a modified laundry day schedule. Now, “kids” laundry day is wednesday… “mom and dads” is friday… diapers still fit every three days, but now i’m doing them consistently instead of sometimes getting to that fourth day and being like “oh crap we have no diapers”… towels get done on monday, sheets are tuesday, extra randoms are thursday (i keep a hamper in my bathroom because otherwise dirty clothes would never find their way to the hamper when the kids get a bath) but all of those are one-load-wonders, so easy peasy. best part of all, is i’ve (almost) eliminated the rut of baskets of clean laundry in every room of the house, but not where you’d want them to be if you were actually looking for something
I don’t do a lot of folding. I hang shirts and pants on hangers immediately so they don’t wrinkle. Everyone’s socks and undies (including undershirts) are tossed into their own empty hamper for THEM to fold (or not, if they choose). My kids are teenagers, so they can decide if an undershirt needs folded. When a load of towels is done, we all help fold them. They can do these things since I am doing the pre-wash sorting, and the washing and drying and hanging.
I’ve always much preferred Laundry Day. The fact that it involved TWO THINGS HAPPENING AT ONCE makes my OCD efficiency-obsessed brain very happy. Especially when you can add FOUR THINGS happening at once with washing, drying, folding, and watching a movie. Now living in apartments, we have either done Laundry Day by going to a laundrymat, or by having multiple washers & dryers available, which means *googly eyes* multiple loads washing & drying at once! If we go to the laundrymat, it costs more but we get everything folded there because invariably there’s a load that needs a double dry, there’s a gap between the first load being done washing & the last one so then there’s a gap between them on the dry cycle, and as we fold we find the things that are still damp to run a last load through the dryer. Home laundry day tends to be more about doing chores while we await the laundry timer, which results in more piles of clean clothes sitting there (and possibly being folded NEXT laundry day) but meh, they’re clean. I’ll take it.
Bonus: Laundry Day means that you’re home to catch it if the washer overbalances, leaks all over, or the dryer explodes. One load a day and I tended to toss it in before I left for work, or whatever. Therefore Laundry Day is a safety choice too! 😉
Late to the party but whatever. So I’ve been reading about your one big laundry day. And even though I have a laundry routine that I’m rocking and hasn’t caused me any problems in recent years, I though, “Hey! Nony’s never steered me wrong before. Maybe I should try this!” Well, I can definitely say, if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.
One laundry day taught me a few things – I prefer doing a load of just baby clothes and a load of just our socks and undies – so those should be once a week loads. However, my brain doesn’t remember to move the laundry along quick enough to do it all in one day. So I’ll go back to my different loads on specific days – or when they get big enough to need to get done.
Thank you for the phenomenal blog! I’m enjoying it so much and it has helped me keep our home in control! Especially your ideas in conjunction with the app Habitica. (So I have a checklist on my phone that resets itself every day!