Laundry OMG! It Never Ends

In our home the most used appliance is without question the washing machine. My wife and I use it at least once a day, sometimes even twice a day or more! Why do we have a never ending amount of clothes to wash? Well, let me explain.

The laundry basket most likely only empties once a year if you’re lucky. The reason is is because we have a full house of children which includes five year old twins who think it’s fine to change clothes four or five times a day! Of course the clothes that they do take off may not be dirty, but foolishly we have taught them to put their worn clothes into the laundry basket. Big time mistake! I would be proud that they have done something that I asked of them, but the work it creates it massive when you’re washing what in truth is clean clothes.

Also when you have older children, which in my case, two are in university at different times in the year, the washing machine moves into overdrive! We all know university students don’t wash clothes! They wait until the holidays and come home with 10 bags of washing!

If your home is anything like mine there are times when it can look like a laundrette with dirty clothes overflowing out of the laundry basket, wet towels dropped where they were last used (my wife is the biggest culprit with wet towels), and then we also have clothes drying on the airer.

So, here are my top tips for keeping on top of your laundry and keeping your home tidy.

1. To ensure that your home doesn’t look like the shop floor of a clothes retailer my first tip is to have laundry baskets in every bedroom, as well as the bathroom. Here’s a good size laundry basket that is also very stylish.

2. In the bedrooms you don’t need a full size laundry basket. A great alternative is a half size basket, especially in your children’s bedrooms. Something like the one pictured below is perfect.

3. My final tip is probably the most difficult one to achieve. Teaching your children to pick their clothes up off the floor and put them in the laundry basket. Of course when it’s full encouraging them to take it to the utility room where the washing machine is. This is definitely a work in progress for me, as my children have not quite grasped the idea of tidiness. We can only hope that eventually they will work it out and discover that the fairies don’t actually exist haha!

Keeping your home tidy is a never ending job, but to stop your dirty clothes or wet towels just being left where they were last used putting laundry baskets in the bedrooms and bathrooms can help. It might not make your children use it, but hopefully it will wake their subconscious, and the message might sink in to pick up their dirty clothes off the floor.

How do you cope with your laundry? I would love to hear.