How to Conquer That Overflowing Laundry Pile, Once and For All

Remember those olden days when you only had your own laundry to wash, dry, fold, and put away? Yeah, me neither. I also can’t remember the last time I had all my laundry completely done. Laundry is a cycle (haha, pun not intended) and if it ever does manage to get done all at once, we know that time is fleeting because … there is always more laundry on the way.

So a perspective shift is in order. The question isn’t How can I ever get all the laundry done? It’s How can I stay on top of the laundry well enough so that everyone has clean clothes all the time, preferably without having to dig through baskets? This can be done, but it requires a commitment to staying on top of a plan.

If you’re sick of spending weekend hours upon hours trying to catch up, here are some effective ways to stay on top of the kids’ laundry, once and for all:

The “while it’s warm” laundry method involves folding the laundry immediately after the dryer beeps. The idea is that by not allowing laundry to languish in the dryer or in laundry basket, you prevent a bottleneck of clean laundry from forming. This also avoids the dreaded “Is this laundry basket full of clean or dirty laundry?” Folding laundry by load (rather than folding multiple loads at once) also keeps the task manageable and quick. 

Folding the laundry while it’s warm not only helps you deal with every clean load right when it’s ready, but it also drastically reduces wrinkles. Yay! The key to this method is putting the folded laundry away immediately after folding it. 

This laundry method, popularized by Courtney Holsworth of A Life from Scratch, involves gathering the laundry of everyone in the household every single night and washing it all, start to finish, the next day. While this does mean walking around to different rooms to put laundry away and also eschewing traditional sorting practices, if you practice this faithfully, you will stay on top of clothing laundry.

Sorting laundry by person saves time when you’re folding and putting away. You deal with each person’s laundry one at a time and then go to one dresser and/or closet and put it all away at once. This streamlined method is easy to achieve. Simply have a hamper for each person, or at the very least for each room. Dual or triple laundry hampers make this straightforward.

One surefire way to cut down on the time it takes to deal with kids’ laundry? Eliminate the entire step of folding it. To some people, this just feels wrong. To others, it is the permission they need and the only way to actually keep their kids supplied with clean clothes. 

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