How to Organize Your Laundry

Welcome to our 35 Days to an Organized Home Challenge! We would be remiss to not include a section on how to organize your laundry. This is such an essential organizing system for maintaining everyday life and looking neat and “put together” as my mother says.  Laundry is another example of a sorting process, and requires daily maintenance for most families. Setting up an organized laundry space is essential for working efficiently.
Each of us has a different amount of square footage to maintain our laundry. Last year my sister lived in a single floor townhome with her fiancé, and they had a dorm style stackable washer and dryer in a closet. Other than a single shelf in the side of the closet, they had absolutely no space for sorting laundry. So, you do what you can with the space you have, and my sister would literally sort on the floor and place each load subsequently into the laundry. She had to be highly organized with her time and efficient in getting the laundry done so the piles didn’t last (which she was VERY good at doing, considering she’s still not even twenty-one years old yet)!

These are tips that can be modified depending on your living space, but provide an overall general routine for organizing and laundering your clothing and household linens and fabrics.

1. There are two ways of collecting and sorting laundry.  One way is to have a laundry basket/bin in each person’s bedroom, where they bring it to a central laundry location so it can be sorted. The other way is to have one central location where all laundry is placed and sorted. Depending on space (as in my sister’s case) laundry can be sorted on the floor if there is no sorting area, or it can be sorted into three separate bins, whites, colored fabrics, and towels/heavier fabrics. We have a three-bin sorter that we use in conjunction with those three categories
2. If you have items that need dry cleaned, it’s best to keep them in a separate bag that can be taken directly to the dry cleaners.
3. To create a streamlined look, purchase bins that are matching colors for laundry supplies, clothespins, etc.
4. Keep an extra bin/basket for mismatched socks that you can sort once every week or two. This works wonders for us, and keeps the extra socks from sitting on our dressers in our bedrooms!
5. Use one small bin for items that come out of the washer or dryer that need to be taken to another room, such as coins, toys, etc.
6. Declutter by getting rid of unwanted items and empty containers.
7. Make sure to clean your lint trap after every load, as this can be a fire hazard. We actually keep ours for my father-in-law to use as fire starter!
8. Regularly wipe down the washer and dryer as they will collect dust and lint very quickly.
9. Manage your time well by multi-tasking. Place a load in the washer at the beginning of a time where you know you won’t be leaving the house. This allows you to work through as many loads as possible. These times for me include as soon as I come home from work, or early in the morning on a day when I’m off school.
10. Keep a lint roller in the laundry room, along with your other supplies.
11. If you wear a lot of clothes that require ironing or wrinkle easily, it helps to have a place to hang these clothes on hangers as soon as they come out of the dryer. Our local Dollar store carries a plastic coat rack that can double as a place to hang clothes on hangers.
12. If you have enough space, giving your child his/her own bin in the laundry room is an easy way of organizing their belongings that need to be returned to their room.
13. Reduce by consolidating supplies as much as possible. If you have two half-used bottles of detergent, put them together to save space.