Organize laundry to shrink overwhelm
I’m going out on a limb here to say that all of us have experienced piles of laundry at some point. Maybe it’s a stressful time at work or you are busy doing your taxes but life happens and those piles of clothing can feel overwhelming but are temporary. Laundry overwhelm may be a more chronic condition when the piles last for weeks, and a whole day is spent catching up only for the piles to come right back. Chronic laundry disorganization is usually the result of a breakdown of the laundry process. Fixing these issues and simplifying the process will make laundry feel less difficult and keep the piles under control.
The simple view of the laundry process is that we start by wearing our clothes, getting them dirty, and taking those clothes off. In a perfect world, the dirty clothes go into a hamper where they routinely make their way to the laundry room to be washed and dried. Then they’re folded and taken to closets or dressers to live until we take them out to wear, starting the whole cycle over again. If the laundry is piling up somewhere in the process, it’s because of a breakdown, a barrier, or inefficiency. Let’s take a look at some common breakdowns and the solutions that banish the piles:
Laundry is never put away
Clean laundry is piling up in the laundry room, on the couch, or in your teen’s room. If you have piles of clean, folded clothing that never seem to get put away, then lack of clothing storage may be the problem. When closets and dressers are full, we will find ourselves struggling to shoehorn clothes into spaces that are already overflowing. It’s human nature not to do hard stuff, so if it’s hard to put laundry away, we won’t do it. In this type of situation, we have two possible solutions:
Add capacity by improving our closet systems or adding dressers
Adjusting the volume of our wardrobe to fit the storage we actually have
Frequent clothing purges are especially important in kids rooms as their storage spaces are often filled with clothes that fit 6 months ago. By first purging the dresser and closet, we open up so much space that the piles of clothes on the bed will practically put themselves away.
Dirty laundry seems to be everywhere
Dirty laundry is piling up and you feel like you have to go on a scavenger hunt to find it before you can start laundry. It may even be mixing with the clean clothing to make for even more work. The right solution keeps clean and dirty items separate, is easy to use, and easy to move to the washing machine:
A big basket located where your loved ones take their clothes off is much more likely to catch dirty clothes than the attractive hamper you have located in an aesthetically pleasing location. This may mean baskets in playrooms to catch the socks and hoodies that are stripped off during play or in the bedroom by the dresser where your spouse changes clothes.
Keeping clean and dirty clothes from mixing is essential so implement a very obvious system like color coding the baskets - white baskets for clean and black baskets for dirty.
Give ‘clirty’ clothing a home. These are the not clean/not yet dirty items that can be worn again. Hooks on the back of bedroom or closet doors are the best solution to ‘catch’ these items so they don’t mix back in with the piles and make more laundry!
The piles are in the laundry room
Having to step over piles and move things around to get to the washer will cause the frustration that leads to procrastination. If everything is piling up in the laundry room there is likely to be a combination of two problems, there is too much stuff in the laundry room not related to laundry and not enough space or solutions to aid the actual laundry process.
Take the nonessential items out of the laundry room. This is especially important when the laundry appliances are close to the door our family uses the most. The shoes, coats, dog leashes, and school papers work like a roadblock to actually doing laundry. A daily sweep of this space to move those items along to their homes will free up space to actually do laundry.
Add solutions that support the laundry process. I recently worked with a very frustrated working mom to revamp her laundry room. We turned an unused corner into a flexible laundry workstation by adding a rolling hamper with a top to make room for sorting and folding. We added wall mounted drying racks to make room for drying swimsuits for her family of swimmers. We don’t expect people to cook without pots and pans so why try to do laundry without the appropriate tools?
Actually, in the twelve years I’ve been organizing I’ve seen ONE laundry room that had enough space and storage. It was glorious and I think of it often. It was the unicorn of laundry rooms!
When piles of laundry are a warning
Stuff piling up can often tell us things about ourselves. I have an autoimmune disease and I’ve learned that my first symptoms of a flare up are dirty dishes in the sink or piles of laundry. I ‘see’ the flareup before I ‘feel’ it. If laundry hasn’t been a problem before, check in with yourself. Be gentle and go for progress over perfection. Personally, I find that completing the entire process of just one load of laundry a day can feel less daunting. I wash, dry, fold, put away one load and that’s good enough until tomorrow. I worked with a client that has suffered a major health and emotional upheaval in her life. To catch up, we took everything to a laundromat, paid for folding service, and got it all done in 4 hours. We went from a laundry room that was so full as to be unusable to a beautiful space by the end of the day.
Conclusion
Laundry is part of life and many of us feel that laundry tasks are relentless. Look for ways to to cut the work of laundry by balancing the loads of clothing to the storage we have, simplifying and communicating all steps of the process so all family members are onboard, and give yourself space and solutions to support the work. I had a client that had a huge laundry room and he added closet rods for his dress shirts. They came out of the dryer and went directly onto a hanger. He would dress for work in the laundry room and that worked for him very well! The best solutions are the solutions that work for your family - ‘normal’ is just a setting on the dryer.