Home Creative Ideas

Maintaining laundry is good to do daily, sure, it depending on how big of your family is. You must do every day when you have at least 3 kids in your home. For example: baby laundry is handled differently than adult laundry. You shouldn’t use fabric softener for baby laundry, but its fine to use with adults’ clothes.

So choose a day to do just for baby laundry and choose a different day to do adult laundry. Do your oldest child’s laundry on a given day, maintain that day on a weekly basis, your next child’s laundry to the following day, etc. If you keep up on it, it won’t become overwhelm your home again.

If you find laundry tedious, sort and pre treat while you’re watching TV, for example. It takes moment to pluck a piece of clothing out and check it for stains, squirt it with pre-treater, and then put it in the dirty basket, ready for the wash. Folding can be done the same way.

Once it’s folded, better putting it on the recipient’s bed, not in the basket. This way, it must be put away before retiring for the night and you won’t live from a laundry basket full of clean clothes.

If you have things that need ironing, do it when the laundry is clean and hang it up. Be done with the task and make sure that clean, ready-to-wear shirts or blouses are smiling at you when you walk in the closet in the morning.

Now look at your floor. Does it need sweeping?

If so, grab a broom and sweep. It won’t take you more than 5 minutes and you’ll feel much better about your room and your work, especially if something you’ve just washed falls on the floor as you’re transferring stuff to the dryer.

Congratulations! You’ve done the preliminary work of organizing your home, you won the battle in your laundry room! Take a 15 minute break and enjoy this victory. Then start the task of doing the excess laundry that you’ve been collecting, one pile at a time. When the first is done, swap it out immediately to your dryer or to hangers, if that’s more appropriate.

Take it one pile at a time in other words, small steps! Soon, you’ll find that it really only takes 5-10 minutes to fold warm clothes from the dryer and put them in laundry baskets, ready to transfer to the appropriate rooms, closets, and drawers. The rewards are huge here—keep up on it; one load every day. And you’ll win the war against the Mt. Vesuvius of clothes in your home.

Now take a critical look at your supply-shelf. Do you have empty bottles or boxes lying around from spent detergent and/or fabric softener? Clean those out. Use that grocery bag that you’ve put excess dryer lint in and pitch those empties. Then organize what’s left. If you need to add things to your shopping list, now is the time—now you know what you’ve got and what you need to buy. When you organize your supplies, I recommend putting the detergent and any liquid softener above the (gasp!) washer. Make it easy to reach. Put the dryer sheets over the dryer—why reach more than you have to?

If your shelves are higher than you’d like, use the top ledge of your washer & dryer to hold supplies! I’ve never seen a washer and dryer that don’t butt up to a wall for the electrical plugs they need. So use that space to your advantage. Put the detergent box or bottle on the top of the washer, along with whatever other washing supplementals you have. Put the dryer sheets on the top of the dryer so you don’t forget and end up with a load of static cling!

If you have wire-shelves above your washer & dryer, you’ve got a built-in place to hang a trash bag. Use that extra grocery-sack and cut one of the handles in half. Then tie those two ends around some of the wire-shelf and use the bag to collect dryer lint and empty containers from your emptied laundry supplies. When it’s full, cut it down and put it in the trash and put up a new one.

If you already know what importantly for organize the laundry area of your home, let's start with the small step:

Can you see the top of the washer? If answered is "not", just repeat the steps in #2, using the window cleaner if necessary.

OK... now you’ve got your washer & dryer cleaned off. Congratulations!. Next, we take a critical look at your supply-shelf

If you look around your home, you probably see lots of clothes. Am I right? You’ve got clothes in closets, you’ve got clothes in piles, meaning to put them away and not having time, eventually just pulling them out of the pile and wearing them. And then you’ve got clothes in laundry baskets. You might even have rumpled clothes in the dryer or (heaven forbid!) the washer. If it’s the former, the clothes are only rumpled. If it’s the latter, they’re probably rumpled and smelly and (potentially) mildew-y. Sigh! Somewhere in this Mt. Vesuvius of laundry, dirty, clean, or otherwise, is your home.

And I’m guessing that if you have a laundry room, you keep the door closed, as there are multiple Mt. Vesuvius piling up in there. If you don’t have a laundry room but have a laundry closet with room for the washer, dryer, and some shelves, I’m betting you haven’t seen the top of your dryer for weeks or even months. It’s covered in rumpled clothes and towels, right?

Why I wrote the "clothes adventures" above? Because if you need organize your home, the laundry area must be the first target. And here’s why: if you get your laundry room cleaned and organized, you’ll be much more apt to actually DO the laundry that plagues you and helps your home to be disorganized. And because you won’t want to undo the work you’ve done in the laundry room, you’re more likely to fold the laundry when it’s done, and put it away. There’s something that’s a breath of fresh air about a straightened laundry room—sort of like when you walk in to a closet where everything is hanging neatly.