Laundry systems for families

[Baboontyme 2876]

Do you have a method that works for you and your kids? It's utter fucking chaos in my house right now and I need to get something figured out. I don't think we need to separate or sort by color, just by person. 

[HornOnTheBayou 9057]

How old are your kids? Can they run the washer/dryer or help with folding? 

[Post Oak 20551]

I don't sort. Everything gets washed in cold. Kids are 9 and they fold and put up

[thunderlounge 8331]

Is this a major need? A crisis? If so, guess I could ask the wife, provided you don’t care if things end up laying on top of the dresser for a week before maybe finding the closet. 

[UT_OB1 2263]

53 minutes ago, thunderlounge said:

Is this a major need? A crisis? If so, guess I could ask the wife, provided you don’t care if things end up laying on top of the dresser for a week before maybe finding the closet. 

A week?  Nice humblebrag 

[tx 3 putt 78480]

wash everything in cold water and separate by person 

[Baboontyme 2876]

1 hour ago, HornOnTheBayou said:

How old are your kids? Can they run the washer/dryer or help with folding? 

Yes but the dynamics are kind of complicated and don't need to get into the surly thing where we start trying to break down all aspects of my personal life failings. They are pre teen and teen and certainly capable but if I tell them everyone is responsible for your own shit it's going to all fall to my wife again, which results in the current chaos. Fun fact, while googling ideas for this I found out that laundry is particularly challenging to keep up with for people with ADHD which probably could have saved me a bunch of posts in the Wives and the shit they say thread had I known. It explains a lot. 

At any rate, I'm thinking something like a bin system in the laundry room where each person has a bin and when the clothes are dry they go into their respective place, folded or unfolded. Each person can take their bin of clean clothes to their respective room to fold and/or put away. 

[luke duke 6447]

My wife used to get so stressed about laundry. So I told the kids they were now responsible for washing and folding their clothes. My wife looked at me like I told them to jump off of a cliff and start flying.

They’ve been doing it ever since and my wife has created other things to be stressed about.

[DallasHorn26 587]

My teens have been doing their own laundry for a few years. They each have an assigned "laundry day" to get their stuff washed and dried.

[immamac 44208]

Buy small laundry hampers not big ones. When they are full they need to be washed. They aren't allowed to put dirty clothes on the floor.

Problem solved. 

[Reagan1k 3042]

A lot of life is just picking your hills to die on.  Depending on the personalities and stressors involved, it may be worth looking at a wash/dry/fold place that charges by the pound.

Call it a cop-out and rightfully so, but sometimes surrendering a small battle to win a bigger war is the path of least resistance.   

[Jerry Callo 8956]

48 minutes ago, luke duke said:

My wife used to get so stressed about laundry. So I told the kids they were now responsible for washing and folding their clothes. My wife looked at me like I told them to jump off of a cliff and start flying.

They’ve been doing it ever since and my wife has created other things to be stressed about.

My girls stared doing their own laundry in middle school.  No issues.

[MonkeyDoughnut 10765]

Team laundry by person no sorting clothes, towels, sheets separate.

Teen need to be doing their own laundry. It's a life skill up there with reading.  Pre-teen, keep it simple. I'll do your laundry under my terms - ie I tell you to bring down basket, you do, I tell you to put away your clothes you do.  When they decided they didn't want to do those "easy" steps they got to learn how to do their own laundry from start to finish.

Everyone knows my laundry day, they need to find other days. 

Laundry shouldn't be a stress point. If they don't do it, they just need to learn how to wear dirty, smelly clothes. 

Any type of bin system, color coding, yada yada... would be like telling your wife to make sure all her t-shirts are turned right side out... not happening

[KYHorn 17568]

On 12/16/2024 at 10:36 PM, Baboontyme said:

Yes but the dynamics are kind of complicated and don't need to get into the surly thing where we start trying to break down all aspects of my personal life failings. They are pre teen and teen and certainly capable but if I tell them everyone is responsible for your own shit it's going to all fall to my wife again, which results in the current chaos. Fun fact, while googling ideas for this I found out that laundry is particularly challenging to keep up with for people with ADHD which probably could have saved me a bunch of posts in the Wives and the shit they say thread had I known. It explains a lot. 

At any rate, I'm thinking something like a bin system in the laundry room where each person has a bin and when the clothes are dry they go into their respective place, folded or unfolded. Each person can take their bin of clean clothes to their respective room to fold and/or put away. 

We use a bin system for clean clothes as you describe. I handle all the washing and then sort them into the bins. Then, the children are responsible for folding and putting them away, though we usually do it on a particular night together. 

I recommend putting one person in charge of the washing and drying- it's just too chaotic, messy, and probably bad for your water/electric bill and the longevity of the machines to have 4-5 people washing their individual loads. Folding is what takes the most time and effort anyway. The person in charge will probably need to run a load per day. Just get into that routine and know that if you skip it today, you'll have to do 2 tomorrow.