Save time on laundry

With four kids, we have a lot of laundry! I have tweaked our system over the years until it really runs mostly smoothly now. We will be adding another member to our household (my mom) in the next year so we will have 7 people's clothes to wash, plus food towels, sheets/towels, and whatever else ends up in the laundry room. Here's some tips I have that will hopefully help you as well!

1) Have your kids help if they are old enough. Even a little kid can pick up the clothes out of their laundry and hand them to you one by one to put in the washer. I always made sure my kids had a hamper and reminded them daily to put their clothes in the hamper. Even a two year old can throw dirty clothes in a laundry hamper. When my oldest was little, he had a hamper with a basket ball goal design which encouraged him to make a game of it.

2) If your kids are older, have them do their own laundry! Our kids have been doing their laundry since they were about 8. At that age most of them could fully understand how to do their laundry and could reach all the buttons. They had already been helping so they knew how much soap, spread out the clothes inside, etc. The only problems we ran into were not being able to easily lift and pour the big jug of soap. Our house wasn't set up where a big jug with a pump built in would fit near the washing machine. So we found a small pump bottle of method laundry detergent that they could easily hold. We refilled it with our regular laundry detergent when it got empty and it has been going strong for years! We figured out how many squirts were needed to equal the correct amount of laundry detergent and wrote that on a piece of masking tape on the bottle. Unfortunately, Method doesn't sell that bottle anymore, but I suspect a regular liquid soap bottle would do the same trick.

3) Put your family on a schedule. We used to just wash clothes whenever someone's hamper was full and were always playing catch up. So we assigned each person a day to do laundry. Monday - Thursday are kid's laundry days and my husband and I wash our clothes and any other laundry on the weekend. When my mom comes, we will probably just put her on Friday and keep rolling with our regular schedule.

4) Make a place for misc. laundry to go. There's always random laundry that needs to be washed separately than our clothes. We have a basket in the laundry room that is for random laundry. This would be for bath towels, sheets, really dirty laundry found lost under furniture, towels people wiped the floor with, muddy towels, red items that will bleed, etc. When I notice we have enough of the same type of item, I'll run those items in a separate load, but that way they are not in the way until I can get to them.

We also use cloth napkins so there is a bin set up near the dining room for those to go into along with kitchen towels. We only put dry ones in there which allows me to wait to wash those until the bin gets full. Which is about every two weeks.

5) Consider upgrading your laundry equipment. I say this as someone who had the cheapest washer and dryer I could find for a while. However, as we've replaced things, we've tried to find the nicest replacements we could afford. Even if that was just a step or two up. Our newer washer washes more clothes faster and with less wear on them. Our newer dryer has an ultra low setting which has allowed me to start drying almost everything I used to hang dry without any shrinkage. It also just dries way better than our 10+ year super cheap dryer which saves so much time.

6) Set up clean laundry storage in a way it's easy to put away. Everyone's pajamas, underwear, and other things that are fine to be wrinkled just get tossed in a drawer. We don't have to sort much because each person's clothing is washed separately. Tops and bottoms are either folded in a simple way that doesn't take much time or hung up depending on the person. The oldest 3 people in the house have tops and bottoms hung by choice, and the youngest 3 have them simply folded in the drawer. We don't do any fancy folding either. Just what is required to prevent a ton of wrinkles and fit them in the drawer. Even my 6 year old puts her own clothes away. We don't fold underwear or pair socks together. We just find that doing that takes way more time than it's worth. Underwear isn't going to get super wrinkled and no one will see it if it does! It only takes a few seconds to find the correct pair for a sock instead of taking several minutes on wash day to sort all that out. It takes everyone 5-10 minutes to put their clothes away. I do hang the girl's dresses, but that doesn't take long.

This has worked so well for us that I have even been able to find time to wash other people's clothes as a side hustle through Sudshare. I'll tell you more about that another day though!