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.
Next time I’ll just roll a die to decide who does the laundry.
Produce less dirty laundry. Depending on what you do for a living, and the climate, some clothes can be worn more than once. The main ones that come to mind are pants, but your discretion on other items. Just don’t be gross and stinky
As an adult with a family, this won’t be accepted anymore.
This right here is the real problem. Can you explain what’'s unacceptable about it and why you’re not asking, “How do I convince my spouse to accept this?”
That probably isn’t even necessary. If OP doesn’t mind doing dishes, they can share responsibilities. OP does dishes and puts them away, spouse does laundry and puts clothes away. Everything is now clean and tidy and nobody HAS to do the thing they hate.
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.
…. Only a week?
Are these people regularly shitting themselves while wearing jeans? Doing yard work in jeans?
Why are they being washed every week - are they heavily soiled?
Shit, even my pair I do construction work in, I only wash when they get too soiled.
My off work pair I wash like once every 8 months.
Pretty sure a lot of jeans just tell you to wash once every 6 months unless you really soil them, or just use a brush to remove debris and throw in a ziplock in the freezer if they smell.
My partner’s dad had a pair that stood on their own. Not frozen, just gross. Gotta admire the dedication I guess.
A week? Rookie numbers
You’re supposed to wear raw jeans for at least half a year before ever washing them.
The heck? I do have like ten pair of jeans and don’t wash them unless I get something on them, but still end up washing a pair of jeans every second week at least. Always manage to get them dirty in some way.
My husband used to not wash his much but got a rash on his thighs & the doctor said to wash them more often. Not like every time you wear them, but not just twice a year.
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.
Oh yeah let me do a 45 minute workout in a T-shirt and then wear it to work the next 3 days in a hot factory.
nice try fbi
This is not an acceptable response from Poem_for_your_sprog. Do better.
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.
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
You can probably get away with socks and underwear just being tossed in a drawer. I actually find button-up shirts easier to deal with than t-shirts because hanging is easier than folding.
You can hang t-shirts too though
Yeah, but it’s more of a pain, and I don’t have enough closet space for all my t-shirts in addition to pants and button-ups
Invest in merinos and wool / hemp / tencel-lyocell clothing . They retain less odor, evacuate sweat better, plus, more adapted to heat/cold regulations. Even wool can be cool in summer. Avoid cotton first layer like t-shirts, you almost need to wash them after one use. They tend to smell quickly. A merinos shirt can be used Monday, be hanged Tuesday, used Wednesday and so on. Invest in a good pair on denim jeans if wear this kind of pants and remember that it doesn’t need to be washed unless it’s stained or smell bad. Denim should just be hanged on reverse side outside from time to time to take fresh air. Use merinos socks too. Work the same as tshirt. You will still need to wash, but less often.
The cons are merinos and other wool need to be hand washed at best (there wool program on machine, but I don’t risk it). And merinos is more fragile than cotton or synthetic fabric.
And if you don’t like folding, use hangers. That how I do.
Alpaca > Merino. Better temperature regulation and softer feel.
Check out Paka. They have fully traceable alpaca gear, also in tencel/merino blends.
Dresser. Little boxes called drawers that hide your lack of folding. They’re great for things like underwear items.
Of course, you’ll look like like child or homeless person walking around in crap that’s wrinkled to that degree. Depending on your job, you may get pulled aside for a talk regarding your appearance.
The dresser will remove roughly half this onerous task for you, reducing clothes on hangers in a closet, but you’ll likely still need clothing that doesn’t look like it came from the dirty floor pile.
The definition of adulting is accepting a list of tasks you never really want to do. Until you’ve done that, you haven’t really grown up all the way yet.
I think there’s unavoidable costs to doing laundry.
But I try to minimize them by doing stuff like rolling my t-shirts instead of folding them.
Also, you mentioned UX design. Well, I do a bit of Lean, if you want to call it that. In particular, I minimize switching costs by focusing on one type of item at a time. For example, first I get all the boxers out of the pile of washed clothes. Then I check they’re not inside out. Then I roll them. And then I place them where they have to go.
I adopt a production line mindset. And it can become a game. How fast can I do it this time?
As an adult who has just sacrificed a box room for a Boaxel system with a bunch of open boxes to toss my clothes into (similar to your shelf system but visually less messy), I don’t understand why you can’t go back to a system that worked for you before.
Laundry is also my mortal enemy. The folding mostly, so now I’ve done away with that. Little basket things on each shelf for various clothing items, it’s much more aligned to my natural style. Use it, don’t fight it.
i have a touch of the autism and i can tell you what has made a huge difference for me. especially with socks and underwear but also shirts and shorts and sweatpants, always buy the same exact brand and style. find the best option for each member of your family and stick to it across the years. laundry day will become MUCH less of a task. 👍
OMG yes. I finally standardized my pants (specific scrub bottoms that look office-professional but have specialized pockets) and tops (floral polos. They never look wrinkly). It’s so much easier to dress and put clothes away.
Socks are optional. I don’t have a problem with socks, I just don’t wear them /joking
Yes, this, and if you find an item you like buy multiple of that item in different colours and you have a bunch of different looking clothes that feel the same to you. Also with the underwear you can actually throw them out when they get holes, that is allowed, and you can buy a few extra packs and just have them there as spares for when you throw some out, just swap them into your drawers as you remove broken ones.
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.
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.
