Laundry Woes

I have a lot of areas that I am weak in. Laundry is definitely one of them. I have really improved through the years, but during that time our family keeps growing so the net results don't look much better. I have tons of laundry around. There's the ever present dirty stuff as well as a big messy pile of clean stuff that needs to be sorted and put away before it permanently looks wadded up.

Really, I think it is this putting away of the laundry that really does me in. I hate when you have a pile that has items that literally need to get put away in six different locations. It actually makes me crazy and robs a bit of my sanity. So, my solution to this is that each family member has their own laundry basket and I wash all of their clothes at once and then they get put back into their basket and then put away. This does work pretty well, especially if I keep up on it. The problem is that I don't always. Then I have laundry baskets of clean laundry sitting in the kids' rooms and they are throwing their dirty stuff on the floor of their closet where it all gets mixed up together. Then I end up washing loads of mixed up clothes which, in turn, get piled up in my laundry room because I hate to sort them to put them away. That is where we are now. My laundry room is literally a black hole of (mostly) clean laundry.

This terrible laundry state has driven me to think about a new way to tackle laundry. I truly have no idea if this will work for us, but it should solve some of my problems. I am thinking about moving everyone's individualized laundry baskets into the laundry room so that clothes can be sorted right as they come out of the dryer into them. Then each child (perhaps with an older helper) would be responsible for putting away their own clothes. Also each person would take their dirty clothes to the laundry room to be sorted and washed instead of piling up in their closets.

I am thinking that I may try this with just the little ones and see how it goes. My older girls do their own laundry for the most part, so I don't want to mess with that. We'll see how it goes and I'll report back.