The only bad part out of moving out of a tiny apartment, is that I'm suddenly finding it overwhelming to do laundry in a house with three floor and an unsteady toddler who likes to always be in eye sight of her Mama.
How do you guys survive?
My old laundry routine was a) have a family closet in our room three steps away from the dryer (I put all the dresser drawers in our room. My young kids tend to throw clean clothes on the floor and that way I could quickly clean up the mess without resorting to tons of unnecessary loads.)
b) fold clean clothes on my bed
c) make it a rule that we always had to fold up any extra clean clothes before the parents went to bed
The new house doesn't have a system yet!
Now I've got my kids on the second floor, our bedroom on the first floor, and our washer/dryer unit on the first floor. Our dryer is old and on the fritz, so we're talking about having to run each load through multiple times. Also, my only safe place to put Baby Tess while I'm doing laundry in our dangerous basement is leave her in her crib, and she hates that! Her crying sort of add this added pressure to get all laundry tasks done within 2 to 4 minute spurts. All that post-moving chaos combined with my fatigue, have just made me feel so hopeless about the situation.
Just today, I'm trying to figure out a big-picture solution to this task.
First, I thinned out the kids clothes to things that they actually wear. I'm putting everything that is not currently a summer-time favorite, on a hanger in their bedroom closet. Then I moved down their dressers to the basement. I've got a place for "hanging items" and now places for clean laundry. Now it should be easier to fold things straight out of the dryer, or hang up wet delicate to air dry.
I also found these two interesting articles on green laundry methods and practical laundry collection ideas.
Does anyone have some wisdom to share? I'm open to trying almost anything but FlyLady.
St. Clare, patron Saint of Laundress, pray for us!
