9 Sure Fire Ways to Make Laundry Easier

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These 9 tips will help any busy family make laundry easier. Get organized with these tips to create a working system that works for your family! Tip #9 is my favorite!

 

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Are you feeling absolutely overwhelmed with the amount of laundry your family creates each week?

Are you feeling like there has to be a better way to take completely necessary, but thankless chore easier?

If so, I think you’ll like this post.

When it comes to laundry, we all know that it’s one of our least favorite chores! Whether you have young kids or older ones, it seems like the pile never ends. Whew. While we will never be able to avoid the laundry pile, there are a few tips & tricks to making the chore a bit easier for you to manage each week.

 

 

 

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9 SureFire Ways to Make Laundry Easier

While these laundry tips and tricks won’t stop the laundry, they will definitely make this chore must easier to manage this week! Please don’t forget to download your laundry planner at the end of this post. 

 

 

1. Create a Mental Game Plan for the Week

Using a laundry planner (get it at the bottom of this post), determine when you want to do laundry. Certainly, we can’t avoid it, but if you make a plan you are way more apt to stick to it AND keep it from being overwhelming.

Write down when you want to do your darks, lights, or little one’s clothes. Don’t forget to include loads for towels, sheets, and blankets. Do you need to have 2 loads a week dedicated to towels or just one load? Consider how often you want to rotate washing your sheets.

If you have a pool or live in warmer weather, you’ll likely have a revolving load of beach towels and bathing suits. I usually toss all my extra items like dish towels, bathroom hand towels, and the kids’ bath towels in those loads.

 

 

2. Be Willing to Work with Small Loads All Week

Rather than waiting for the weekend to do all your laundry, consider planning your laundry for one load every other day throughout the week. And then 2 loads on Sunday.

Not only will you avoid overwhelming yourself, but you’ll also have time to enjoy your weekend! There is nothing more boring than folding laundry on Sunday when you could be out enjoying the afternoon.

Since Jordan & I regularly exercise throughout the week, I try to do one darks load every other day. In that load, I toss in all our gym clothes (including the towels & wet/dry bags). I’d rather have them clean & not-so-stinky than waiting around for the weekend’s towel wash.

 

 

3. Hire a Laundry Service

Do you absolutely hate doing laundry? Did you know there is such a thing as a laundry service that takes it all away from you dirty and is returned folded?

If the thought of laundry is a complete nuisance, or you find yourself hating the time you spend each week doing laundry, this may be an option for you to consider.

Our work has a laundry service drop-off and when it was shown to me I thought “I’m a mom, don’t they know I’m more than just a single bachelor? Why would this be necessary?”

But I was wrong.

The more I thought about the laundry service, the more it made sense for ALL families. You’re busy and need to free up time. This service takes away a HUGE BURDEN of work.

The pickup occurs early in the week and drop-off is 2-3 days later. I love this idea for clothes and towels! When I priced it out, the weekly cost wasn’t as much as expected and way less than my time is worth.

I’d recommend looking for laundry service near you on Google. 

Have a kid in sports or group activities? I’d recommend keeping the uniforms at home just in case you need them last minute!

 

 

4. Designate Drop-Off Spots Throughout the House

When it comes to sorting laundry, avoid wasting your time by running around the house looking for dirty clothes. Designate hampers, baskets, or even drop-off spots that visually tell you something needs to be washed. While each of our little ones has a hamper, I always know that a dishtowel on the steps means it needs to go straight to the laundry room.

See my favorite bathroom closet organization items here!

You don’t need to get fancy, simply find a working system where you know that if something is on the floor— it should all be in a consistent spot!

 

5. Make Mesh Bags Another Set of Hands

I don’t love the name  “lingerie bag.” However, I do love the functionality of those little mesh bags! Whether I’m washing someone’s shoe inserts, the shoes themselves, or little items that need to fold together for this mom’s sake,  I like to keep them together throughout the entire laundry cycle.

While I know that I’m supposed to hand wash bathing suits, I will guiltily admit that I set the bathing suits in a mesh bag, wash them and hang them up to dry afterward. If they weren’t in the bag, I would’ve completely forgotten about them and they would’ve gone through the dryer!

Who wants to dig for matches in a pile of laundry?

 

6. Plan Your Loads to STOP Wasting Time!

When it comes to planning a day of laundry, there is nothing more frustrating than having a load that finishes up in the washer but the load in the dryer still has 40 minutes to go.

Plan your first load of the day as the one that will dry the quickest. Unless you need the blankets for bedtime sooner, make your blankets or towels the last load of the day.

For the kids, we’ve learned that we have to separate their laundry from ours. Their clothes dry quicker than ours and often fools our dryer into thinking the entire load is finished— when it’s really not. Now, I just plan to their clothes first since they do dry relatively quickly compared to our jeans & sweaters.

Not only do blankets & towels not wrinkle if you miss folding them, but you’ll be able to move your loads through far quicker when you aren’t waiting around for the dryer.

 

7. Use Your Washing Machine’s Delay Button

If you avoid doing laundry during the week because you don’t want wet laundry lying around, use your delay button. Consider delaying the start of your load until 45 minutes to an hour before you arrive home. I don’t like to run the washer mid-day because I am notorious for completely forgetting there was a load running… and it sits wet all night…

At least if the washer is in its final spin minutes when I walk in the door, it will remind me to change it over to the dryer!

Not only does this save you an hour worth of washing & waiting time, but you’ll also be able to do #8 quickly.

 

 

8. Fold & Put Away as Soon as Possible

Gahhhhh folding….  [that is me cringing with a necessary, but not-so-fun task]

While I do not love folding, I strongly dislike seeing piles of laundry more. If you can manage to do just one load of laundry a day, spend the 10 minutes post dryer and quickly fold them. Not only will that pile never look overwhelming, it’s so much easier to do small chunks rather than a full Sunday’s worth at once.

How do I keep myself in check with folding everything as it comes out of the dryer?

Don’t forget to download the free laundry planner in my printable library!

We only have one laundry basket. We are weird. And we know it.

If you can, sneak all but one laundry basket into your basement or closet. For 2-3 weeks, use the one basket method to keep all the clean clothes you have contained in one area.

 

 

9. STOP Double Folding!

Do you really want to save time?

Here is the easiest laundry trick I’ve found.

I used to fold all our laundry. ALL OF IT.

But then I realized that 80% of our laundry needed to be hung up in the closet. 

One day a lightbulb went off.

Why was I folding the clothes that needed to be hung?

So here is what I do…

When I have an item that will be eventually hung, I like to shake out that item and lay it flat on the carpet/guest bed/wherever. Laying it flat avoids it becoming wrinkly and saves me several seconds an item that doesn’t need to be folded!

Then, once the rest of the laundry is folded, it’s easy to scoop up my ‘to be hung’ clothes and walk them into the closet.

 

 

My Favorite Laundry Supplies

When it comes to doing the laundry throughout the week, I try to keep it as simple as possible. Here are my favorite products for making sure the laundry gets clean and smells fresh a few days later

• Tide Pods (I’ve used both Sam’s Club & Costco versions. Both work okay, but I find myself splurging on Tide but in bulk)
• Downy UnStoppables (Pour on top of load in the washer. These make everything smell so fresh! Again, we buy in bulk)
• OxiClean
• Bleach (For my white bath towels. In the past we had colored towels and I always struggled with a musty smell. I bought white towels and wash them in bleach. No more bad smells!)
• Bounce Dryer Sheets 
• Wool Dryer Balls (These have been on my must-try list for years!)
• Lingerie Bag (I’ve used them in multiple sizes throughout the years)
• Wool-Lite (For my handwash only sweaters. I use the hand wash cycle with this detergent!)

 

Finding time to do laundry will always be a well-orchestrated game of sneaking in loads in-between other errands. However, you will more in control once you create an organized system for ways to make laundry easier— not harder! 

 

 

GET YOUR FREE LAUNDRY PLANNER HERE!

 

 

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