The part I despise the most is putting them in the closet. I’ve tried many solutions, but I’ve not found any that made the job less tedious.
When I was a student, I just threw my clothes into various shelves based on the type and considered that good enough. I did not fold clothes ever. I just threw the boxers in one shelf, the socks in another, T-shirts in another, pants in another.
As an adult with a family, this won’t be accepted anymore.
I had a period in which I had a dryer, but I did not find that it saved me a lot of time because the fastest way to get the laundry into the shelves and the hangers is by sorting it first. And if I had to sort it anyways, I could just sort it on the drying rack and put it on the hangers on the drying rack.
I think it’s fairly hard to find solutions to fix this.
I have considered mapping out each step, and then try to identify the pain points. Then find ways to remove as much friction as possible. Kind of like how an UX designer would handle this.
Single type of socks so you don’t need to pair them.
Dry shirts/t-shirts etc on hangers, then just hang up the hangers. You can extend this to trousers etc if you have the hanging space.
Single type of socks so you don’t need to pair them.
I didn’t even realize what a life hack this actually is despite having been doing it for like 15 years.
I genuinely love laundry so I’m not sure I’m the best person to comment but here are a few suggestions:
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as others have said, get a set of drawers so that you can just chuck different clothing items in different drawers. If there’s no space for that you could get some storage containers/baskets for smaller items in your closet.
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Try rolling up your clothes rather than folding them. This is often recommended for packing but I always do it. It saves space and you can roll a bunch of clothes quickly and they’re easy to move from where you’re folding to the wardrobe. This image gives a rough idea, but you can find tonnes of videos as well:
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I have a dryer. All clothes go in the dryer because outside is wet and inside is tiny. If clothes don’t like the dryer, they shrink and we can’t wear them, therefore all clothes are dryer-safe. After dryer, clothes are piled on couch. When clean clothes are needed, they’re on the couch.
why won’t it be accepted any more? Does your family care more about the state of your closet than you being happy?
Seriously, talk to them about it, tell them how you feel.Become a nudist.
No clothes = no laundry.
I used to dislike laundry in the past, until I figured out that the part that I disliked was the monotony and lack of mental stimulation. This could be solved by listening to podcasts or audiobooks while doing the laundry. Now I no longer dislike it, because it’s really only an opportunity to listen to podcasts for 30-40 minutes (hang-drying/folding time)
Find a partner who doesn’t mind doing laundry.
Live out of a laundry basket. If anyone questions it just curl yourself around the laundry basic and scream like a possum protecting its nest of young. Maintain solid eye contact throughout. Defecate if necessary.
They’ll never mention it again and probably warn others. you can then live out of that laundry basket free of judgement.
Follow me for more info about living life with the freedom of a possum .
Lower your standards. Half-ass fold things. Don’t use hangers. I drape over the drying rack and have gotten pretty adept at a quick lift and couple of shitty folds into a stack. Another tip is to have clothing that don’t care about wrinkles (synthetics, sports clothing). Then you can just throw them into a drawer. I have pretty homogeneous clothing (all the same featureless t-shirt in black, white, grey, same underwear, etc). This helps with the organizing on to the drying rack. I know exactly how many of each goes where and it is trivial to color coordinate so the half ass folding naturally collates the stacks.
I wait to do laundry every couple of weeks. It all fits in one load most of the time (bought largest high efficiency machine, 12kg capacity). Some clothing gets more than one use before washing, and it entirely depends on how active I am in that clothing.
All of this helps me personally mitigate my extreme disdain at the task. Oh, and getting absolutely stoned out of my mind. Put on some tunes, it ain’t so bad either the draping (largest things first), or the shitty folding.
I often put on a podcast while folding laundry to entertain myself…
Nakedness. Ideally find a work from home situation. Careful answering the door.
Converting my family into nudists does not seem to be the right solution here.
However, the idea of trying to reduce the amount of clothes that are worn daily might be on the right track.
Start with pants. You can wear one pair of bluejeans for a week.
A week? Rookie numbers
You’re supposed to wear raw jeans for at least half a year before ever washing them.
…. Only a week?
My partner’s dad had a pair that stood on their own. Not frozen, just gross. Gotta admire the dedication I guess.
My grandpa wore coveralls, he had a rack of identical coveralls and I can’t remember him ever wearing anything else.
As an adult with a family, this won’t be accepted anymore.
Says who? Like if it’s your clothes your room your life, do it your way.
Signed. A couple who hasn’t folded clothes in months
This is called a Haberdasher Stand. When you undress you hang you clothes on it. Wear the same clothes as many days in a row as you can. Much less laundry per week.
I bet you smell bad
if wearing the same thing 3 days in a row makes you stink, you should probably talk to a doctor.
I mean, it depends greatly on what you’re doing in those clothes
Where did OP say they don’t shower? Unless they have a particularly stinky job, clothes don’t need to be washed after a single wear.
This is not an acceptable response from Poem_for_your_sprog. Do better.
nice try fbi
OK, so I have ADHD and absolutely hate tasks like laundry. I have found a few different solutions which have worked at various points in time depending on my available means.
When I was drying clothing by hanging I started hanging my t-shirts on hangers to dry. This meant I could get them out to dry in one handful and that once dry they could all just be put into the wardrobe with no extra fuss. Underwear and socks were handled by hanging on a little clothes horse and then just thrown in together into a drawer. I make sure to only have one type of identical sock so I can not pair them.
Now that was all good and fine but my means have increased and life has gotten better, so my methods have changed. I can now afford a heat pump dryer. This is an absolute game changer. I put washing on, when it is done I move it from the washing machine to the dryer, then when it is done I put it away.
The dryer is super efficient, using way less power than a traditional dryer and hurting the clothing way less. It uses the same system as an air conditioner to pull moisture out of the air while it throws the clothes through the warm dry air.
Because I have enough clothes now I can also do a smalls load and a separate load for just t-shirts and then all the other clothes like pants and jumpers. Because of that I can sort the smalls much faster and then put them in my new storage.
I have an 8 cube shelf. In each cube I have a fabric box which has one type of item. I have two for t-shirts, two for pants, one for underwear, one for socks, and two for anything else. I just dump items in with no folding or sorting. If I want a shirt I can pick the colour but because all the shirts are the same brand and model that is the only difference I have to deal with. My pants are basically all of a type and are really only summer or winter gear, so I just have long pants on one box and shorts in the other.
The great thing is the simplicity. Shirts are never folded, rolled, or in any other way managed. They are just thrown in. I try to empty one first and then fill that one first from the dryer so they all get rotated through, otherwise they would go musty after a time, but apart from that it is super low effort.
I also have the same for towels and bedsheets, but for bedsheets I put the full set inside one pillow case with the fitted sheet as the last item in so when I use them I pull out and apply the fitted sheet, then the flat sheet, then the second pillowcase to cover the pillows. My kitchen stuff is also similar with a single basket on top of the fridge with tea towels and microfibre cloths so I can just replace them daily or more as needed. I really should put a mini basket in the kitchen for the dirty ones but for now I just throw them into the laundry.
Overall I spend less electricity washing clothes and drying them in the dryer than I did rewashing clothes I had put off hanging. I think it is a worthy trade and saves me from avoiding the washing too much.
I can recommend going a step further, if you can afford it. Get an all-in-one combo ventless heat pump washer/dryer. That’s a lot of buzzwords, but it’s not a compromise, it’s pretty much the best of all worlds. I have one (made by GE) and it’s basically perfect except that it spent the first few months of its life constantly nagging me to install “the App” and/or connect it to the Internet, which I absolutely did not do and it eventually gave up.
This is not a traditional ventless all-in-one, there’s nothing traditional about it. It uses a heat pump (effectively using both sides of it in fact), it runs on a single 120V socket, and doesn’t vent any moisture into the house nor does it suck any conditioned air out of the house during heating/cooling seasons. It washes first and then dries the entire load in one go. It doesn’t vent because it dumps the condensed water down the drain instead using the cold side of the heat pump to condense the into liquid and the hot side to actually heat and dry the clothes. It’s actually even more energy efficient than you imagine, because a lot of the heat is in fact generated by the latent heat of the water as it goes through phase change, with wet air cooling slower and dry air heating faster, it’s some bizarre physics at work but liquid water at room temperature is actually a huge energy battery and the heat pump effectively uses some of the water’s own energy to heat and dry the clothes. It can even do unique things like blow air first before the wash (called “pet hair mode”) to get most of the hair and lint out so it doesn’t go into the pump and the drain.
Besides being energy efficient and smart, this significantly reduces laundry effort too. No more switching from washer to dryer. It’s start-and-forget. Other than cleaning the filter and occasional maintenance like vacuuming the lint out and refilling the detergent tank, it’s a magic machine where dirty clothes go in and a few hours later clean clothes come out with an absolute minimum of energy used. If it could sort and fold them too it would be absolutely perfect, but alas, we’re not there yet. It’s still pretty damn good compared to a traditional laundry experience.
I wear the same clothes two days in a row, sometimes three. This alone cuts laundry in half, or by a third.
When I take off my clothes I don’t bunch them up or turn them inside-out, so they come out of the dryer ready to hang with minimal fuss.
All of my socks are the same, black Dickies, so I don’t need to match them.
I hang everything, because I hate folding. Also, when it’s folded, it’s stacked somewhere, and you need to dig through the stack to find anything. Socks and underwear go in a bin.
