Laundry
Ok, it’s not the most exciting subject. (Not even close)
But, everyone has to deal with laundry. I figure I have been doing my own laundry since I was at least 10, so I have been at this for 25 years(ok, more than that, but who’s counting?). Then, if you add in that I started doing Hubby’s laundry at least 18 years ago, and then The Boy’s for the last 15, it starts to add up. And I’m still not that awesome at it.
I hardly ever pre-treat stains.
I hardly ever iron.
I hardly ever iron to anyone’s satisfaction.
I do, however, fold the clothes to MY satisfaction. It is just one of those routine, habitual things – the particular ways I fold the clothes. And if I don’t fold them just the way I like… I will take them out and re-fold them. Just a bit of OCD there, huh?
So recently I had my best friend Sally help me out with a laundry problem. I give her FULL credit for the solution to my problem. There are 2 laundry baskets upstairs for The Boy (one in his room and one in the bathroom) and 2 in our bedroom (one for me and one for Hubby). So when I would do laundry, I would get all the laundry baskets into the basement and sort the clothes into piles for washing. But, if laundry took more than a day (that work thing is a real pain in the butt!), then we were left with no laundry baskets in our rooms to use.
So Sally said: you should get some of those collapsible clothes hampers. Put them in the regular baskets, like an insert, and just take those out on laundry day. So even if it doesn’t all get done, at least there is a place in the rooms to put the days’ dirty clothes into – and they won’t land on the floor (it’s a theory, anyway).
So I did that and it is AWESOME! (See how easy I am to impress?) I took it a step further and bought some large cloth hampers and wrote “WARM”, “COLD”, and “JEANS/TOWELS” on it for sorting. So now I don’t have piles of dirty clothes on my basement floor (no more kitty cat nesting areas!).
But you are probably thinking… “what about the whites? Doesn’t she have any whites?” Of course I do, silly. I just sort those right into the washer and get them done first.
And now I am “going green” (no, I am not turning into a frog) by line drying.
I used to do this all the time when I was a kid. Our house was so old that there was no vent to the outside for the dryer, so instead of heating up the non-air conditioned house in the summer time, my mother made us line dry the clothes.
Hubby & I purchased some retractable clotheslines and put up the 40′ one. I’m not sure how impressed I am with it… it tends to sag too easily. Instead of putting up the other retractable line (only 20′), we re-appropriated the dog line as a clothes line. It works pretty well – doesn’t droop too much. We haven’t used the line for either of the dogs for at least a year, maybe longer, so it doesn’t interfere with that. (They were starting to dig and that was getting The Hubby kinda upset.) My problem will be when we have a “full” laundry day. I used every inch of the dog line AND the 40′ retractable line for a “light” laundry day (about 3 to 4 days worth). Laundry adds up in this house due to Karate classes. And it’s stinky, sweaty, wet laundry … so it’s not like I would ask anyone to “re-use” the shirt, thinking it was “just worn for a few hours”. So I may need to start doing laundry twice a week instead of once.
Of course, that all depends on the weather. The great thing about summer is the sun; the bad thing is afternoon thunder showers and humidity. Either one of those will throw your schedule off.
One of my goals for doing this is to offset the kilowatts we use on the house air conditioner. I’ve often read that one of the biggest draws of electric power in a home is the dryer. So, for the summer, I will be trying to conserve energy by using the clotheslines instead of the dryer. I do see where there may be an emergency that I will have to use it, but as a regular habit, I will be hanging them up to dry.
The Boy commented that when he touches his clothes they seem stiff, but when he gets them on they feel fine. No other real comments about this little experiment yet. We’ll see how it goes!