My Laundry Plan – How to keep up!


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I don’t know about you, but laundry has always been a challenge for me. In the past I could never seem to keep up. I always had laundry baskets filled with dirty laundry, towels piled on the bathroom floor, and clean laundry waiting to be folded and put away. Laundry was always a “work in progress” that never got done! Whew!

Well..I wanted to share how I have handled laundry the past several years. This system has worked wonderfully for me and maybe it will give you some ideas to try.

We live in a 2-story home, with all the bedrooms upstairs. Our main bathroom is on the main level (which is where we have our “main” dirty clothes hamper. This presented a problem. How could I organize our laundry for all the kids and my husband and me…how to get it all downstairs when it was time to do laundry…where to put all the kids’ dirty laundry without running up and down the stairs… Well, I came up with a plan that is working…here it is:

1. First, I got laundry bags for every bedroom (those kind you can get at Walmart for about $5 that has netting with wire framing so that it stands up). The kids are to keep their laundry in their laundry bag in their room.

2. Next, I set up our laundry schedule:

Monday – Boys clothes (the 2 boys that share a bedroom). They pull out any dirty white clothes in their laundry and put them in the hamper in the main floor bathroom to be washed on Wednesday. My oldest boy (age 12) takes care of washing and drying all the boys’ laundry, and folding and putting away his laundry. I help my 7-year old fold his clothes and he helps put them away.

Tuesday – Girls clothes & toddler clothes. They pull out any white clothes in their laundry and put them in the hamper in the main floor bathroom to be washed on Wednesday. My oldest daughter (age 18) takes care of washing and drying all the girls and toddler laundry, and folding and putting away her laundry. I fold my 4-year old girl’s clothes and 3-year old boy’s clothes and they help me put them away.

Wednesday – husband’s work clothes and our clothes. On this day I wash the clothes that are in our bedroom laundry basket, as well as the clothes in the hamper in the main floor bathroom. This usually means that I run one load of work clothes, one load (sometimes two) of colored clothes, and one load of white clothes. I also keep a laundry basket in the laundry room for my husband’s work clothes. He works concrete construction and his clothes get pretty dirty sometimes! So those are kept separate and washed separately on Wednesdays.

Thursday – Bedding and towels. All the sheets are washed on Thursdays, as well as a load or two of towels.

3. Once our schedule was set up and posted on the refrigerator (I actually add it to my Daily Planning Pages in my Intentional Planner now!), we simply followed the schedule each day to keep up with the laundry. We try to get everything folded and put away each day too. That doesn’t always happen, but we try!

This system has really worked well for us. There is minimal sorting since all the kids’ clothes are kept together. They can wash, dry, and fold their own clothes easily without me having to sort them all out for them. You might find another system works for you. I think the most important thing is to look at your family, think about the simplest way to accomplish the task, and then make a plan.

By using this system, we have all the laundry done by Thursday! No laundry is done on Friday. The only laundry done on Saturday is one load of my husband’s work clothes. That’s it! It feels so good to have all the laundry done heading into the weekend. The house is clean (because we have followed our daily cleaning chores…more on that in another post!), the laundry is done, and we can truly enjoy a wonderful weekend!

Why not give it a try! You (and your family) will be glad you did!


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4 Comments

  1. Great system Sheri. Laundry bucket for each room doable. High school Children Our system: We have had a clothesline in the garage strung from overhead door rails. So great for the mid week jeans or misc. [ I don't store the cars here]. During the week, all people put their dirty ones in the baskets near the washer. Each morning I sort the small pile from night before into whites, darks etc. This keeps it organized for wash day. For weekly laundry I wash at home on Sat and go 5 min away for laundromat, drying there. Easy to fold ,hang clothes on hangers with a different partner each week. Two quarters is 16 min. Most t-shirts are done in 8 minutes. We begin hanging those while other loads finish. Hanging freshly done laundry eliminates almost all wrinkles. We Hang clothes hangers on the headrest support post in van to go home. 60 min. roundtrip. Socks need to be matched at home. Very Little IRONIING. This works good for the stage we are in. I started using this method when the dryer went out, but quickly realized we were breaking even/saving money 7-8 months a year by not adding the dryer heat to the A/C bill. (Humidity + long summers ). If I still had very young children things would be different.. I rarely used cloth diapers, when I did I wanted a dryer for that task. We don't accumulate a lot of clothing per person now. Also the micro-knits get hung on hangers and drip dry at home... so this keeps our volume down.
  2. Yes, having a laundry basket/bag in each bedroom is what has worked well for us, too. After we started doing this, we really wished we had thought of it sooner. But it does help to have some older kids who can tend to their own laundry. We have trained kids as young as 7 in how to do their own loads of laundry, and that has worked fine. We don't follow the well-organized system you use, though-- that sounds like a really good plan. It has been more a matter of, well, someone notices they're running out of clean clothes, so they better do the load that's been piling up in their room. Also, we usually have to wash towels at least twice a week, and sometimes three times. We've found a way to save on electricity for drying, though-- we hang the towels up on a fold-out wooden dowel type drying rack, and have the ceiling fan on while they dry all night.
  3. I have found laundry is easier with minimal sorting as well! With 1 child, it works very well to do his clothes by themselves (adding in white stuff if his load is not enough on its own) We'll find out in August how it works with 2 kids!

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