Raise your hand if your kids just went back to school? Stand up if they just went back to school after a year of virtual learning? Anyone else trying to navigate life after so much togetherness - trying to establish a new routine? We can certainly relate. In fact, now that life is returning to some state of normal (masks and all), many of us are trying to establish home care routines that not only work, but make our homes more functional. With that in mind, today we'll discuss 7 back-to-school laundry tips that will not only help you get your laundry under control, but will also save your sanity for the upcoming school year!
Divide and Conquer!
As much as we'd like to believe that everyone in your home will do their part (including their own laundry), let's be honest - it just doesn't happen. BUT, the concept of separating your laundry into manageable parts is feasible. In fact, we recommend that you have separate bins or baskets for family members or materials depending on what makes the most sense for your family.
For example, if you have young children and you find that everyone is showering in one bathroom, it doesn't make sense to have baskets separated by family member. Rather, you might have a towel basket, darks basket and lights basket. Meanwhile, if you have teenage kids, you may want to have a towel basket in the bathroom, and a clothing basket in their room. Towels can be combined and then each person's wash load can be handled separately. You might also add another basket just for sports clothing. Always make sure to wash jerseys and sports attire separately.
Establish a back-to-school laundry system for your family that makes sense and the chaos of doing laundry is quickly reduced.
Get the Whole Family Involved
We are huge fans of getting the whole family involved in laundry tasks. For some families, that means kids are doing their own laundry - in others, the entire family comes together to fold laundry and put it away.
Laundry doesn't have to be boring either. We've heard many a family come into the laundromat to do laundry together talk about how they're going home to watch their favorite show while folding. What a fun way to make back-to-school laundry a lot more interesting!
Just Add Ice!...
...to your dryer to remove wrinkles! If you find yourself regularly fighting a wrinkly mess, you can toss in a couple of ice cubes into a light load of back-to-school laundry. Use the highest heat setting and dry your clothes for at least 10 minutes to reduce wrinkles from the steam that is created by the ice. We've also had good de-wrinkling success by adding a wet washcloth to our dry load to freshen up air-dried clothing.
Stick with One Type of Sock
If you have kids, then you know the struggle of trying to match socks. Whether the dryer eats them or your kids end up slinging across the room causing permanent separation, socks tend to cause unnecessary drama. But, they don't have to.
For all your back-to-school laundry needs, we suggest sticking with one type of sock, per family member. For example, everyone wears the same type of white socks. Matching is easy when there is only one type of sock to match. Even if one family member wears black and the others wear white, the chaos of trying to keep track of various types of socks disappears when you only have to worry about one type.
Alternatively, we've found that some people prefer not to match socks at all and just toss the right size into a basket and call it a day.
