Airing Out The Dirty Laundry

I am always interested to know how other mothers manage their daily tasks. Whether you are sharing with me how many baths your kids get a week or I am sympathizing with the more mundane bathroom cleaning. There is this drive inside of me to be more efficient. More organized. It's a sickness really. But I constantly have my ears and eyes on the look out for tips and tricks used by other veteran managers of the home.

I thought I'd start a new series of weekly posts sharing how we at the Knucker Hatch home manage some of our "stuff". And in return, I'd love to hear from you, and how your day goes on these topics. Are you game?

Let's work from the bottom up: Mondays. I don't know about your house, but Mondays are the heart of the Mother-Lode work week here. Second only to Tuesdays. Mondays are all about the ever prevailing, never ending laundry. Other than the daily tasks that are required around the house, laundry management is my sole focus. It used to be that I followed the FlyLady's philosophy on laundry which required a load a day, but after trying that method for a year, I quite honestly grew tired of having to look at laundry every stinkin' day. Just give it to me square on for a full day, and let me be done with the entire ugly thing for the rest of the week.


I know my limitations on this however. And I have a two too many loads to do, to get things completed on Monday before I grow weary of the assembly line. Almost always, I never get that last load out of the dryer and it sits for a week. So to offset this pitfall, I usually start Sunday evening with two loads that require very little attention, or if I don't do Sunday evening, I'll save these loads for last: the table cloth and towels loads. That way, if they sit all week in a drier, no one cares if they are wrinkled, and there is no big loss. Or if I get them washed Sunday, they can sit over night in the drier until Monday when I throw the first clothes load in.

I will confess that with the new house we have two working laundry rooms. However, with 10 loads of laundry to do, it is still quite a project to tackle, requiring firm commitment to complete. For the extra nitty gritty details I'll share that I am a liquid Tide, Bounce drier sheet, Oxi-Clean stain removal user. TMI, I know.


What may make our house different than your own, is our closet management. This is something that I started after moving into our new house, and it has been one of the best changes in my life of laundry and closet management. I have often read how larger families have found it liberating to pool all of their clothes into one hanging closet. I wasn't sure I would like that idea, but I decided to give it a try when we moved to the farm house. We have a large walk in closet on the older side of the house, which is also the side we do all living in right now...aside from sleeping. There is room enough for my daily clothes and all of the children's clothes. The clothes are on low enough poles that the children can access their own, and we hang everything short of underwear and pants/shorts. Ken has his own closet in the master which still works well for him. Each child has their own PJ bin on the floor. High above, are storage bins of clothing and shoes sizes that are not in use.


Two things have resulted in using primarily one closet. First, I have more control over the daily mess that can occur in the closet, rather than being surprised with a trashed closet every week, and I can stay on top of the kid's habits better. (Mom's you know what I am talking about here.) Their rooms stay amazingly clean since all clothing and baskets reside in a closet on the other side of the house.

Secondly, when I put laundry away, I go to one closet. No more trips through three rooms to deposit all of the clothing. No more going to three different rooms when the kids need help with clothing selections or dressing. And the added bonus is all hangers and dirty laundry are in one location. Ahhh....consolidation.

We still use our dressers for winter clothing storage. But honestly, most of them are empty with the use of one closet. The extra closet space is used for other needed storage. I can tell you, that once I was over the "oddness" of using one closet, the entire concept was a dream.

So there you have it. My dirty laundry. Monday is laundry day at the Knucker Hatch house, we do it all in one day, and we use a one closet management system. How do you manage your laundry and clothing? And readers want to know...What is your laundry detergent formula?