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Laundry
My washer is wonderful, my dryer is almost dead. I wash about 4-5 loads a day. More if the weather co-operates and I can hang it out on the line. The boys are getting bigger and go to work so many days in the week, where they must wear certain clothes and those certain clothes get very dirty. Makes a lot more laundry than a bunch of homies wearin’ shorts and not much else. I try to follow this schedule.
- Monday – towels, towels and a lot more towels
- Tuesday – Sally Mae, Hubs, me and a load or two of towels
- Wednesday – three younger boys and a load or two of towels
- Thursday – two older boys and a load or two of towels
- Friday – (ideally) everyone’s bed sheets and a load or two of towels
- Saturday – the shower curtain and a load or two of towels
- Sunday – no way!
We use a lot of towels. The dishes are done by hand, we don’t buy paper towels, some of the kids take daily baths. It just adds up.
I use my oven timer to keep things running. If I restart the dryer after 20 minutes (cleaning the lint trap every time) it gets one medium load dry in 3 cycles. Lately it’s been raining (and we’re not supposed to complain about it because we’ve just been through a 2 year drought) so there’s a ton of mosquitos and I can’t hang out my laundry because of the rain/mud. I do have an indoor rack, just a small one, and I do hang some stuff on hangers and hang them around the house in doorways and on shower curtain rods. But that only helps somewhat. So I limp along with my pokey dryer.
Depending on whose stuff it is, I have different helpers for the folding and putting away.
I also have the kids “sort” their own stuff on their own laundry day. The only laundry I sort is on Tuesdays. And I (for the most part) fold, hang and put it away on Tuesday. The rest of the week my main involvement is with the machines and only because we have this pokey dryer. The boys would start a full load in the washer every time, which is not so much of a problem for the washer, but it’s a giant hurdle to dry a big load in the pokey dryer. So I operate the machines.
A while back I found I was having a bit of problem with clean kid clothes ending up in the laundry baskets. I got grand advice from Leila, she’s really got it goin’ on in the organization department.
I’ve gotten much more relaxed concerning how the clothes are put away. We are not the kind of family who ever looks neat as a pin, pressed, tucked in, or buttoned down, so why pretend? I don’t mean to say we are slobs, we’re just naturally casual. And I like it that way, so why should I fret if the Cowboys hang up their Sunday shirts inside out. Who cares? If they don’t, I don’t. I do a quick inspection on each of them every time before they head out of the house and usually catch any glaring sloppiness. Not a biggie!
Oh, and one last thing. Hubs has declared it to NOT be my job to carry laundry baskets. He did that because I expressed an unwillingness to interrupt the Cowboys “just to carry something” for me. Hubs laid down some law on the spot! Makes my life lots easier!
Tomorrow’s post: Housecleaning and Philosophy
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Good point. And you’d think they would care about how they come out of the closet, but not always (and for at least one – never). Of course, according to all those strangers I run into at the grocery store, my house (and consequently the closets as well) should be just as neat as a pin at all times since all my children are girls. HA!!! You’d think I’d be use to it after hearing it for so many years, but no. I still fight the urge to ask them if they actually have any daughters.
Well, I can’t abide total sloppiness, and the towels do need to be somewhat orderly or there’s just gonna be chaos in the towel closet. But, there’s just no use (for me, anyway) in getting all uptight about how they hang their own stuff. If it suits them, then I’m ok w/it. They just have to understand that if they don’t like the way the clothes come out of the closet, then they had better do something about how the clothes go into the closet.
Ouch! I guess I’m a little picky then when I insist on clothing being hung on the hanger a particular way. I do wish I could relax about that one. And about the way they fold the towels. Okay – they can fold their own anyway they want, but I’d really like it if mine were folded the way I like (because they don’t fit in the cabinet well the other way). Should I mention the obsessive way I insist on the kitchen towels being folded? I just do those myself. Wow – seeing it all typed out like this, I really do need to relax about some of this. Might make laundry a lot less stressful.
StuffMart has those cheap-o wash-cloths $5 for a million cloths (I forget how many really). They also have what they call “bar mops”. I like those for drying dishes. Good enough quality to last a few years, quite absorbent. Totally cheaper than paper. Make the change. In a few months you’ll forget you ever did it differently.
Now I need to get on that cloth napkin band-wagon!
I’m always amazed at the things that can escape a kids notice. Not surprised, just amazed. That’s the very sort of thing I would expect from my own kids. But, truly, having someone else process the clean laundry is a real time saver, even if we never get free of being the machine operators ourselves.
Oh! Congrats on the non use of paper towels. We are paper towel freaks and do plan on moving away from them. (My mom almost never used them.) We have purchased Shamwows and will eventually replace the paper with towels and rags. Though I hadn’t thought of the extra laundry that it will cause. Oh, well. We are trying to move toward less consumerism.
My oldest daughter (almost 13) is my laundry folder. I’ve was trying to train her to load and wash and transfer to dryer but I really feel more comfortable doing that part myself. You see when we got back from vacation a couple of weeks ago, I had her doing laundry from top to bottom. The problem… the DH had unhooked the water and forgotten to hook it back up. The DD didn’t notice that even though she put soap in the washer and “ran” it, that the clothes were coming out dry. I caught it TWO days later when I put a load in because she was busy with school. OH MY GOSH! All that laundry folded and put away that wasn’t really clean! Upside to that little story… at least we didn’t need a new washer… My DD had shown me a few things from the loads she had washed and we pondered why some things weren’t looking clean. I was thinking a new washer was going to be needed. Oy Vey!