Do you often find yourself drowning in a sea of your family’s laundry? As a homemaker and mother of six, I completely know well the struggles of keeping up with laundry for a family. In my video and this post, we will delve into laundry systems that I’ve found through the years that work. This post and video will have The Best Laundry Systems that WORK for a variety of family sizes. That isn’t all though!
I have a video with a super fun LAUNDRY ROOM MAKEOVER and blog post with BONUS tips!
We Found The Best Laundry Systems that WORK
1. Laundry Tip If You Have Only Small Children
If you only have small children who cannot do laundry yet, one of the simplest ways to tackle laundry is this; when you take a large load of random clothes out of the drier or off the clothesline, lay the clothing on a clean table, bed, or on a clean blanket or sheet on the floor. A sofa could do but it won’t work as well. Have all the children that are old enough to come in and pick their pieces of clothing out of the laundry pile. From there, teach them how to begin to put it away so that eventually they can do this on their own.
2. Laundry Tip as Your Children Get Older
As your children grow, sometime around age 10, you can begin to teach them how to do their own laundry. You can assign them a laundry day, and give them their own hamper for their bedroom. This will drastically reduce the number of loads you are in charge of each day/week!
3. A Word About Folding
I see so many moms take hours folding their children’s clothing. I learned very early on that it is pointless to fold little kids clothes! When mine were little, I remember folding my children’s clothes a few times only for them to come along, rummage through looking for something, and completely unfold everything within seconds! Since little kids are prone to changing multiple times a day (whether or not they need to), I quickly learned that folding their clothes was 100% pointless!
As they get older, you can teach them how to fold their own clothing, explain the benefits of folding clothing, and decide if you want to allow them to make the choice to fold or not to fold.
This takes me to tip 4.
4. Bonus Tip; Storing Children’s Clothes
I stopped using dressers for my small children when they were little because I found that young children tear dressers up in a little bit of no time. I found that when you buy a dresser for kids, they pull or lean on the drawers and break them, and also that unless dressers are secured to the wall (and even sometimes if they are secured), they are not that safe because little kids pull on them with the drawers open, leave all the drawers open (making the weight unbalanced), and that some daredevil children who aspire to be spiderman when they grow up will even climb them.
So I started doing bins instead (see video). That has worked so much better because they can’t destroy those nearly as fast as they can a dresser (which is more expensive). Bins are more child friendly as well, it’s easier for them to sort through, carry and handle, and you can label them with pictures and their name. Best of all, they are safer.
5. Minimize Clothing
As I was researching to do this video I found a really good video by The Minimal Mom, and she was talking about minimizing when you have you know a family. I appreciate that tip and I have used it before. I completely agree that minimizing as much as you can is going to help you reduce the amount of laundry that you’re doing and simplify your laundry routine.
6. Don’t Over Minimize!
On the other hand, you don’t want to over-minimize. Here is an example. We used to be a family of seven in less than 1,000 square ft of space. I tell you, those years were not fun not fun at all! Back then laundry was a nightmare to do and since we did not have a good laundry set up it was more time consuming as well. That is when I started practicing minimalism, and I minimized the amount of laundry that we had for each child. I didn’t really have much choice on how much to downsize because we only had a certain amount of space for each child for their clothes, so I had to really pair it down and the problem I found is if you pair it down too much you won’t make it to the next wash day before you run out of clothes. That can be a problem, especially if you have places to go very often. So if possible, you want to find a happy medium balance so you can make it through to the next wash day and maybe an extra day or two in case something doesn’t go as planned. You definitely don’t want to pair your clothing for each person down to the point that you don’t make it to the next wash day, and you have some place to go or an event and there are no clean clothes!
7. Bonus Tip; Sell Surplus Clothing
I think everybody knows about this company but for those that don’t, and for those of us that maybe tried them once and forgot about them for years like I did, you might like to be reminded ThreadUp. Thred Up is a great place to shop for clothing but if you are minimizing or cleaning out your closet it is a great place to sell clothing as well!
8. Socks
Socks wrangling is hard! We are still trying to establish a system for socks, but so far the best and simplest system for socks that we’ve found is to get a lingerie bag for socks every person in the house. Label it with a sharpie (put their name or initials on it), and when they have dirty socks have them put them in the bag. On laundry day, zip it up and toss the whole thing in the laundry. It’s great because it helps socks to keep from getting lost or mixed up with everyone else’s, and eliminates sock sorting. As mentioned, we are still attempting to establish the sock bag trick.
Conclusion
It can take some time to create laundry systems that work for your family, and each situation is a little different. I have found that every time we moved it took a while to establish new laundry rooms and systems that work, but the tips I’ve shared today (with the exception of the sock trick) are some of the solid tips that have worked the best regardless of other circumstances.
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