WFMW: Putting away laundry

For this week's Works for Me Wednesday, I thought I'd write about one of my biggest organizational challenges: my laundry.

I always seem to be behind in my laundry. We have a lovely tri-sorter hamper which is almost always overflowing (for just two of us!). For the past year, I've tried to develop a laundry routine to alleviate that. On days when I work, the first thing I do - theoretically - when I walk in the door from school is to start a load of laundry. On Saturdays I wake up and strip my bed to wash my sheets. On Sundays I wash my towels.

It's a great system, and I am mostly able to keep up with them. I'm usually even able to remember when it's time to move the clothes to the dryer. My problem, and my bottleneck, occurs when it's time to fold and put away. I always have clothes in a basket on top of my dryer and I usually also have clothes sitting in my dryer. They get wrinkly, I can't find anything, and the task of going through them all becomes more and more daunting and overwhelming.

In the past week or so, I've been trying a little laundry hack that seems to be making a difference, if only psychologically.

I went through my closet and grabbed all my empty hangers and put them in my laundry basket. Then, when the clothes finished in the dryer, instead of putting them into the basket, I pulled out everything that needed to be hung up and immediately put it on a hanger and hung it over the doorknob. Then the only things that ever even went into my basket were t-shirts, pajamas, and underwear. As I walked out of my laundry room, I grabbed the hung clothes and took them immediately to my closet.

Then in the evening, all I had to do was spend 5 minutes in my bedroom folding the few stray items and putting them directly into drawers. I could wait a few hours, and nothing in the basket would wrinkle. There was no frightening mountain of clothes to dig through. I didn't need to find a place to lay things flat or run back and forth to my closet for hangers.

It may seem like a small thing, but it Works for me