"Wow! You're a Big Family" Controlling the Chaos Tidbit #4-The Laundry

I'm sure you've seen all the cute signs to adorn your laundry room.

"Laundry today or naked tomorrow."

"Sort today.  Wash tomorrow.  Fold eventually.  Iron ha ha."

"I'd throw in the towel but that would only mean more laundry for me.

While laundry is never done around here, it is usually pretty well managed.  Part of that is due to our laundry room which I specifically planned in order to create an efficient laundry system.  It is not a gigantic space with two dryers or a massive center island; it's just a small space that I tried to make the most of.  The laundry room has two carts for lights and darks and a basket for towels.   It also has a sorting station where I separate out the clean clothes into baskets labeled with each person's name.  Those two things make getting the laundry washed, folded, and put away much more manageable and help keep the dining room table or kitchen counters free of laundry.

Every day, one of the kids brings the dirty laundry into the laundry room and sorts it.  Our bedrooms are all centrally located so we only have one hamper for dirty clothes which makes that task a little easier.   Every day, I wash and fold one load of laundry.  That means there is almost always a load of dry clothes in the dryer waiting to be folded and a load of wet clothes the washer ready to be switched over.  I'm okay with the clothes in the dryer because most of our clothes don't require ironing, even if they sit in the dryer.  When I fold the dry clothes, I fold them and put them into the basket of whomever owns that piece of laundry.  I do not fold or match socks.  The socks just get tossed into the basket and the owner is responsible for taking care of the socks.  Conleigh likes to match hers up and then asks me to fold them for her because she hasn't quite gotten the hang of folding them.  Kenson just throws all his in a drawer unmatched so he rarely wears matching socks.  The last piece of the laundry puzzle happens at the end of the day, while I'm making supper.  The kids are allowed to watch a tv show while I am making supper but before they can watch tv, they have to empty out their bookbags and put away their clean laundry.  Usually, there are 5-10 pieces of clean laundry for them to put away.  Zeke needs help with that so either I do it for him or he and we work on it together at another time.  Believe it or not, usually the people with the most uncontrolled laundry (ie not in the dresser drawers) are the grown ups.  Nobody requires us to put away our laundry before we can watch tv so I'm sure you can guess how that ends up.