Laundry mess...

my laundry mess

I am a mom to five kids and laundry is so easy one of my biggest challenges. Most days my laundry area in the basement looks worse than the picture at the top of this post. I am a little embarrassed to me showing this to the world but I figure the first step in fixing something is to admit you have a problem.

The first problem with this mess is:
All seven of us have way too many clothes. In all honesty I really think that I am a clothes hoarder. I can tell you exactly who gave my child what and when they gave it to them. My memories seem to be attached to their clothes so that makes it extremely hard to get rid of ANYTHING! I have four little girls and I have basically passed all of the clothes down one by one to each of them. I can picture every time any one of them has worn an outfit and feel as if I will lose that memory if I were to get rid of that item of clothing. To try and fix this problem when I am folding the laundry I look at each item and decided if that is something that I will recycle to the next child, if I want to donate it or just toss it out....

one of my many donation bags

the sort in to boxes to store piles

...This has been working very well for us. I have actually been weeding through our clothes pretty well (when I stay on top of the laundry). I do need to sort out the recycle clothes in to boxes so that I will be able to pull them out as needed, but that is another post all in it's self.

The second problem in my mess of laundry is:
How to get it all washed. Even if I got us all down to five outfits each (which let's just face it probably isn't gonna happen). I would still be washing over 70 things each week. That is not even counting bath towels, kitchen towels and our bedding. So I need to have a plan of how I'm going to wash all of our clothes so that we have things to wear. Right now my plan is to do a load a day wash as needed. As much as I would love to say I am more organized than this, I am not. I am usually searching around the house at about 9:30 or 10 pm looking for things for my husband and kids to wear the next day. Now that is just not any fun and I'm kind of sick of the stress of it. So here is my NEW plan...ONE LAUNDRY HAMPER. I am sick of going in to everyone's closet to find their dirty clothes. I am a visual person so if I don't see a full hamper I'm going to think there is nothing to wash. My goal with one hamper is for everyone to put their clothes in there and then when it's full (it probably will be every day) I will take that downstairs and wash it. So basically I will be doing at least a load a day, this just makes me feel better about it.

I am going to keep you posted on my progress because I need to be accountable to someone so that I will keep this laundry going. If your laundry life is a mess, it's probably not as bad as mine, let us know what you've decided to do about it. And if your laundry life is wonderful....please let me know your secret so that I won't be living in such a disaster.