Make a Laundry Date

 

If I didn’t have my laundry routine in place, I can guarantee we would have no clean clothes.  Ever.  And that our bed sheets would never be changed.

When someone writes to me asking for help in getting their laundry routine started, my advice is (almost) always the same: create your routine so you can put it on auto-pilot.

Don’t re-invent the wheel every few weeks.  Write out your proposed laundry routine and work it a few weeks. Then re-evaluate and kick out what doesn’t work and add in a few things that do.

One idea that helps me with my routine is a list of when I need to complete certain laundry tasks. I know that there are laundry jobs that I routinely need to do and they are never going away.  So I put them on a schedule and posted it on my laundry bulletin board.

My current routine laundry jobs are:

• Sanitize and clean my washing machine: 1st of the month
• Straighten and re-organize my laundry room: 10th of the month
• Change sheets on master bed: Every Wednesday
• Change sheets on kids’ beds: Every other Wednesday and prn
• Handwash any items: 20th of the month (and I always hope the Handwash Basket is empty)
• Go through sock bin and match socks: 1st of the month
• Iron: Saturdays

 

Now I am a play-by-the-rules kind of girl, so I try really hard to keep my laundry job on its scheduled day.  But I’m not going to die if the sheets aren’t changed until Thursday or my machine is not sanitized until the 3rd of the month.  And if I actually iron on Saturday?  Huge victory!!  I consider that success.

I would like to tell you how fabulously clean my whole entire house is because I have all of our routine chores on a daily/weekly schedule.  But alas…no such luck.  Only my laundry life has any real semblance of order!  At least for this season of my life with all little people.  There will be plenty of time in later years to be totally organized.

Do you have weekly or monthly laundry jobs?  Do you put them on a schedule?  If you don’t, how do you find time to do them?

 

I am pleased to link this post to WFMW over at We are THAT Family.