Laundry Woes – Organization

It is no secret that laundry is the most hated chore in our home. (In case you missed it I talked about it at length in my laundry rooms post earlier.) To add to our laundry woes we have a totally dysfunctional very basic builder laundry room. Hold onto your seats and prepare to be shocked at the sight of this blogger’s laundry room. 🙂

Yeah…..I end up folding the clothes when all 3 bins pile up that high and there is no more room on top or inside of the dryer. Nothing to be proud of, I know. The pics on the right where the dryer top is clean are recent. No, don’t jump to conclusions. I haven’t all of sudden turned around. 🙂 My in-laws are visiting now and my MIL is a neat freak. Poor thing, she can’t bear the sight of all the unfolded laundry and ends up folding all of it! Ain’t that really sweet of her?

Seeing how much cleaner the room is now I realized that unless I do something drastic we’ll be back to those piles in a month when the in-laws go back. And the only way to make that happen is to make the room more user friendly so that the task is or at least appears to be easier to do. So who to turn to for help? Martha Stewart of course!

Her list of laundry tips include;

• Add rows of shelves and maybe a curtain above the washer/ dryer to keep the laundry supplies handy and out of sight.  This is gonna be a huge improvement over the single shelf we have right now where I have to stand on tippy toes to reach anything.
• On the shelves add small bins for holding stain removers, a sewing kit for mending minor sewing repairs (if I don’t mend it right at the time I see it, it is never done), a catch all for popped buttons, coins or whatever else you find in the kids’ pockets.
• Use sorting bags. More than for sorting whites/darks in our case I need separate bins for hand washables (right now they get dumped in a corner in my closet) and for clothes that my kiddos have outgrown that we can donate. Most often I realize that the clothes no longer fit my son/daughter when I’m folding them and it is way easier to move it to the ‘donate bin’ then and there rather than raiding their closets once in two months.
• Add a drying bar or a fold out drying rack for those special super delicate clothes.
• Know your laundry and stains and treat accordingly. For the new high efficiency (HE) washers use detergents that are marked specifically HE.

Speaking of detergents, I’m usually grab the cheapest HE detergent (our machines are HE) off the shelf kinda person and didn’t really believe there is much of a difference in quality till now. I bought a bottle of Tide HE yesterday to test it out and to tell ya the truth I was blown away. I tried it on the toughest stain that we have at our house, my son’s white baseball pants that are always drenched in dirt and grass stains. It worked! Tide HE provides excellent cleaning with the right level of sudsing for high-efficiency washers. It creates few suds and disperses quickly to get great cleaning performance with only a fraction of the amount of water used in traditional machines.

Hopefully we’ll get to make these changes in our laundry room soon and finally be able to get a handle on our laundry situation. Will keep ya posted.

Do you like doing laundry? What are your  best laundry tips?

Also I’m over at Palak’s fabulous sewing Make It Handmade today talking about………well you’ll have to pop in at her blog to read more.  Here’s clue, it is for a series called Handmade Confessions where a group of bloggers dish out their deepest, darkest DIY secrets or should I say confessions. 😉 So hop on over to Make it Handmade and check it out.

*This post is sponsored by MSLO, Tide HE, and Maytag Powerwash. All opinions are mine.