Jodi Bonjour is an old blogging friend. She isn’t actually old. I just know her from my early days of blogging. We were in a group of bloggers who brainstormed together and tried out all sorts of different ways to grow our blogs, reporting back to each other about what worked and what didn’t work at all.
Over the years, we’d mostly lost touch, but followed each other on Instagram. Her niche is sewing, and I love watching her create things.
In October, Jodi sent me a message saying:
Because I’ve been consistently doing Laundry Day and I have a day when the laundry is DONE, I was able to “do the hand-me-down bins” for 7 kids in one day. It was a lot of work, but it used to take me daaaaayyyyys. Huzzah!
And then in February, she sent me another message:
4 months later and Laundry Day is still going strong. I can’t believe that this isn’t a huge stress for me anymore! If you ever want someone to write a blog post about how to adapt your Laundry Day system for a huge family, let me know.
I jumped on Jodi’s offer.
Here’s the thing. I hear from people ALL THE TIME who love Laundry Day. They tell me they can’t believe how well it works even though they resisted trying it for so long because of all the reasons why they were sure it wouldn’t work. Reasons like working full time (or more than full time) outside the home, or a family member’s extra dirty job that means certain clothes can’t be washed with others, or they have a big family.
Occasionally, though, I hear from people (or read their book reviews) who state that Laundry Day couldn’t possibly work for them because they work full time (or more than full time) outside the home, or they have a family member whose extra dirty job means certain clothes can’t be washed with others.
Or, and this is the most common one, they have a big family.
If someone has a laundry routine that works, that’s the one they should use. But I find it cringy (<- a word taught to me by my teenagers that I’m not sure I’m using correctly) when someone doesn’t have a routine and is overwhelmed by laundry, but won’t try my method only because they’re sure it won’t work. And then feels the need to tell me it won’t work.
Even though they haven’t actually tried it.
Y’all, Laundry Day works.
I love seeing Jodi’s adjustments to the Laundry Day I write about in How to Manage Your Home Without Losing Your Mind.
She figured out what works best in her unique home for her unique family and her unique personality.
Maybe Jodi’s story will give you exactly what you need because you also have seven kids and can do exactly what she does.
But my main hope is that you’ll grasp the real truth about Laundry Day. More than a formula, Laundry Day is a mindset. Those who make “it” work make adjustments for their unique life situations.
Laundry Day works because it’s a mental shift.
Getting all your laundry done in one day is less important than knowing it’s possible to be DONE with laundry.
Here’s how Jodi makes a Large Family Laundry Day work as a laundry routine:
It has apparently taken 5 (?) laundry days to get around to writing you about how I make Laundry Day work for my large family. I wish I had done it sooner, but I was reminded by someone posting a ridiculous meme and I felt so bad for them, I had to finally write it down.
It said: How to Stay on Top Of Laundry When You Have 2 or More Kids: 1. You can’t. 2. Find a new dream.
Well look at that, I’ve basically been doing this method without even trying! Lol.
I have one of those washers that doesn’t have a center agitator, so I can fit a lot more in my washer. We’re a family of 4 with kids aged 7 and 12. I combine everyone’s clothes together and I have 4 piles-dark/black, white/light, jeans/colors, delicate. The dark/black gets washed every Sunday because of hubby’s uniforms. The rest gets washed as we may need them which is every 2-3 weeks (OMG we have way too many clothes LOL).I got fed up with folding everything for everyone, so now hubby and big kid folds their own and I do the rest. It’s such a relief be working myself outta a job! My friends think I’m insane, but I should’ve done this years ago.
My kids struggle sometimes with messing their pants, and I have a newborn that blows out frequently. So I find we accumulate big piles and then I just end up doing daily laundry again during the stinky times. But when everyone is controlling their bladders and back ends and nobody is sick, laundry day is absolutely the way to go!
Love this! We are a homeschool family of five (which means certain children feel the need to change their clothes three times a day) and are expecting twins in the fall! Thankyou for sharing how you adjust Dana’s method for growing and large families 😊
I have always done laundry 2 times a week, back in the day when the 4 kids were little and we didn’t have much money, I had to wash 2 times a week, because we didn’t have that much clothes. They would run out of underwear, if I only washed once a week.
When I worked I washed clothes on Tues. night and on Sat. mornings.
Now (kids are all gone now, and we are retired, but I still wash 2 times a week. )
Because I change sheets on Wed. I wash sheets and anything else in the basket on Wed. so probably 2 loads and sometimes 3 loads, if odd stuff gets thrown in. Then on Sat. morning I do towels and another load of misc. Clothes get put on my bed, and get folded and put away right away. I never have clothes sitting around in a basket not put away. Also I do it first thing in the morning, get a load going before breakfast. (I do not want to think about it all day, I want it done now)
I have nine children (two no longer living at home).
We have our washer and dryer FACING each other, which is easier on my back, since I don’t have to keep side stepping from one machine to the next.
along the wall of the washer, I have several nice hampers.
1. Girls 2. Boys 3. Towels (includes bedding and pillows) and 4. Reds.
5. A specific one for our oldest son who likes to keep his separate.
Hubby keeps his basket in the bedroom, so he doesn’t lose his clothes among all the sons’ things.
And I keep mine separate, too.
On the opposite wall, next to the dryer, we have a lonnnng counter top (just plywood right now). I actually drew 10 squares with permanent marker, labeling each square with a family member’s name. (hubby and I share).
If we recognize who the clothing belongs to, it gets placed on their square.
I decided I needed a small basket to hold dishcloths and kitchen towels and hot pads. We never like to take them ALL down to the kitchen, because it seems like they get used too quickly.
In the earlier years, we would mark the tag on clothing with One dot for the oldest child, two dots for the 2nd oldest, 3 for the 3rd and so on. As they grew out of them, we could easily add another dot for the appropriate child.
(dots are less humiliating than labeling your teens clothes with their name! lol)
Also, our laundry room is on the second floor where the bedrooms are. Very handy.
We keep a laundry basket under a counter in the kitchen, near a first-floor bathroom. So we only have to carry ONE basket UP to the laundry room, EVER.
If we don’t keep it going, we get bogged down IMMEDIATELY.
Seeing all the empty bins under the laundry tables, it looks like Joni has been getting decluttered too! I love seeing those bins stack up!!!
I have almost always done laundry day. I kept it a secret…because everyone knows that you’re SUPPOSED to do one “easy” load a day. I tried that. Over. And over. And over. It never worked.
So, I just went back to my laundry “day”, which generally starts Friday night and I’m done by early afternoon Saturday. I work full time outside of the home, and have 2 young children…3 if you count the hubs! LOL
It wasn’t until I read a blogpost on TheHomesIHaveMade where she has embraced Laundry Day, and your book (can’t remember which talks about it) that I got brave and started telling people with confidence: “I have a Laundry Day.” Most still tell me it would be better to do a little every day. I simply tell them that it isn’t better for me 🙂
BTW: Jodi, you are my superhero! Rock-it, girlfriend!
I’m loving laundry day! We have 6 kids at home and 5 away. If I do laundry day every 6th day it’s only 6 or 7 loads. And we have a large capacity washer and dryer. It’s so motivating when it’s done and I can get laundry out of my mind for the rest of the week! My first laundry day was brutal – 15 loads just after Christmas when all the kids had been home. But it was so worth it and such a feeling of accomplishment! Thank you Dana for all your wisdom and common sense.
I love your podcast and books but I do wish you would include a disclaimer about the laundry day posts. You cannot do laundry day if you are on septic, you run the risk of flooding your system and causing a lot of damage.
It can definitely be done depends on the size of the family. My mother always kepts a laundry day for our family of 3 or 4, and we were in septic.
I agree! Our septic system is set up so that the grey water from the washer runs out into the woods behind our house (on a very large property). My laundry day only consists of 5 loads at the most, so I choose the most environmentally safe detergent I can find (that works), and go for it!
We are on septic, too. But I have implemented ‘laundry day.’ I don’t even have a set day, but just the idea of a laundry day that I can finish, even it is done three days later is motivation to begin.
There are so many fewer clothes and incidentals to launder when it is just begun and done each week.
I would often go 2 weeks without thinking about it and I was like 10 loads or more for just the two of us. We would both be running out of clothes and underwear and kitchen towels, and I had a lot of underwear.
It’s an attitude adjustment…gradual, but it’s huge.
I’ve been listening to the podcast for a few weeks but I’m months behind. I just today heard this episode and was like, “Laundry Day is all I know!” Growing up in a family of 7, every Monday was laundry day. We were expected to bring all our dirty clothes down to the laundry area before school/work/whatever so that Mom could get the task done. It basically took over half of the den, but she managed to get it all done,usually in one long day. But these were the days when both parents didn’t have to work.
Of course, having enough to put in a load can be a something else altogether. Once I was on my own I found myself waiting until I was almost out of “whites” before I’d put together loads. That was basically every two weeks. 🙂
Dana,
I don’t necessarily have slob-brain (although my mom’s memories of my teen years might make her disagree!), but THANK YOU for validating the way I do things that works for me, one being laundry day! I tried the load a day thing, wanting to free up my Saturdays (when most of my laundry got done), but it never worked. So I returned to laundry day, feeling guilty and like a failure that I couldn’t manage something as simple as a load a day. My perspective changed with you, and recognizing the freedom of acknowledging “I’M DONE WITH LAUNDRY FOR A WEEK!” really helped. I have moved back to starting on Friday night, and I am usually done by Saturday at lunch. It doesn’t feel like laundry day anymore…it is laundry half day (it truly feels like Friday doesn’t count, for some reason LOL). And I don’t feel like all I do on the weekends is laundry. I’m not sure I’m making much sense, but anyway, I just want to thank you.
BTW: Doing dishes every night no matter what–CHANGED MY LIFE!
I love the dot method for marking children’s clothes! Brilliant
When I first tried this years ago after reading your blog it wasn’t something that would work for me, I had a washer dryer that took forever and a weeks washing took just over 36 hours. Now I have a separate dryer and better washer I love getting all the clothes done in one day, although towels and bedding sometimes get done on different days. It is great to get it all done, at least until next week.
Lucy, our EMS tried that washer/dryer all in one…I am impressed that you ever got a week’s washing done!!! Needless to say, THAT machine has been long gone from EMS premises!!
As a former family of six that has matured to a family of three (two retired) our struggle is to have enough laundry to justify running a load!! If we are working around home or on the property, we tend to re-wear clothes (except when working outside in a Midwest summer!)
One set of bedclothes is scheduled for the 1st and 15th of the month; the other bed is scheduled around the 10th and the 25th. The other member of the family has a laundry basket in the second bathroom and does their own whenever there is a full load.
I just sort ours into lights and darks. Kitchen and bathroom laundry will be tossed in with whatever fits best that week. We still have heavy denim–those are the last load so we aren’t waiting for them to finish drying.
We are on a septic system, but have no problem these days since we have the HE frontload washer and only 2 or 3 loads.
I have been doing the dishes whether or not I have enough dishes to ‘justify’ doing dishes since August. The family laughs when I am excited to have a decent pile of dishes to do (which takes 5-10 minutes to wash by hand, tops, since everyone has learned to rinse off dishes as soon as they finish and stack them neatly to the right side of the sinks. Easy-peasy!
My kitchen stays clean enough that I am actually able to keep a couple of small appliances on the counters instead of on the shelf in the basement!! It feels so good to have the house pretty much under control all the time now!!!
Thanks, Dana!
I LOVE THIS POST! We are thank G-d a family of 8 and doing all the laundry in one day isn’t possible. I am SO appreciative of this large family laundry day post! Thank you!
This is great! We have 12 wonderful children, and I have always leaned toward “laundry day,” though sometimes it would stretch into a couple of days, especially when all of mine were young. As they got older, they took on more of their own laundry responsibilities. So now it is more divided by room, in general. Girls wash together, boys too, and I do the laundry for my husband and myself, plus any littles who are still in our room. My in-laws live in the same house with us, so the ability to have a washing day and then have the machines clear for another person is also very helpful. Mt Washmore (mostly) conquered!
I love laundry day (+ grace) for the “doneness” of it. Kids are supposed to clean their rooms on Saturday, so they send their clothes down the chute by Sunday night at the latest. Then on Sunday night or Monday morning I start my loads of laundry. I work through those 4-5 loads on Monday. All the loads are in baskets in some degree of foldedness. During Monday night shower/snuggle time I fold them the rest of the way and put them away or have the kids put them away in a bedroom that is probably still clean enough to actually walk through. If laundry lingers into Tuesday or a load gets left in the dryer, I don’t worry too much about it. Desperate people will get that last load for me if it happens to be an underwear-heavy load.
In the summer my loads are more likely 3-4 baskets while the winter is a bit more like 4-5. It’s roughly one per family member. I used to think it was impossible and that our family generated 7 weekly loads at least.
I’ve been doing a Laundry Day and it’s so much better than trying to do a load a day! It was after kid two or three was born that I actually remembered reading about Ma Ingalls doing one “big” chore each day and I went back to my Little House on the Prairie books to check what she’d done. Some of the chores didn’t apply (I don’t churn butter, for example) but it helped so much. All I knew was that the daily load was terrible plus I use cloth diapers. With washing cloth diapers every other day or so, there’s no way I can wash a regular load of clothes each day. I love that you’ve written about this and explained it! I think one laundry day a week is one of the best kept secrets of housekeeping. Granted, I have two days because I wash our sheets on Fridays and then we do the other loads on Saturday currently. Plus I’m washing diapers still, but I don’t count diapers as laundry for some reason. Maybe because they are easy to fold or to tumble into the basket. Love this and love reading about different ways to make this work for different families. So helpful.
Yes!! Mom of six here and this is essentially our system! No laundry on the weekend and mom is happy!