apartment therapy changing the world, one room at a time

three words: second floor laundry!

ok, from the viewpoint of someone who is expecting...the question should be "how often did you do laundry before children, how often post children?" i'll be answering pre-child.

calix, if you've got a second floor AND a washing machine, you need less apartment therapy than some of the rest of us!

Oh we have a great system for dirty laundry (baskets from 10000 villages, canvas liners that serve as laundry bags, enough of them for seperate loads, so no sorting required, etc.), it is just putting away clean laundry that somehow... well, becomes my greatest challenge. I usually have a laundry basket with things that need ironing hanging around...I never seem to empty it for long.

Prior to kids we did it every two weeks.

Post-baby we do it 2-3 times a week.

My sister taught her kids to "dumpster dive" from the laundry basket at a young age and I am hoping to avoid that.

i do laundry on mondays. every monday is cleanup day, where the apartment gets a floor to ceiling cleaning. doing it once a week means it only takes a hour, since it doesn't get that dirty to begin with. plus then midweek i can relax knowing when things will be cleaned.

pre baby... like once a month... our bedroom was a laundry mound!-We had so much clothes. Now we MUST do laundry 2-3 times a week. Would do it everyday but with no in-house facilities..it's rough.

I don't have kids... but I once was one.

We were encouraged to wear clothes more than once if they weren't really soiled. Jeans can be worn two or three times. (I still follow this) Towels can dry on the towel rack and be used again (after all - once you've bathed - you're clean...just wet.)

I don't think my brother and sister-in-law - with 3 kids - have seen the bottom of their laundry pile in 13 years - except the one time my mom intervened.
Of course, my parents had three kids and laundry was always done. (But my mom was of the stay at home variety)
And we had far few articles of clothing than my neices and nephew.

i was actually fortunate enough to be able to put in a washer and dryer on the same floor as our bedrooms when we renovated our house. it's made doing the laundry an easy task.

We live in an apartment and we have a little front loader in our bathroom but no dryer.

We do a load everyday and hang it up to dry outside in the summer and inside in the winter. It's great, in the winter the clothes drying helps keep our apartment from getting too dry.

I try to do a load every day, but it turns out to more often be like every other day. I have very small or non-existent dirty laundry piles most of the time, but I tend to find enough time to wash, but never enough time to fold and put away. So we have three big baskets usually full of clean unfolded clothes, with the occasional clean and folded basket in the mix.

Will be starting to cloth diaper #2 when he arrives sometime in the next few weeks. I think that will change laundry around our house, big time.

val299 - that's a great point about drying clothes in the winter... our apartment gets *so* dry in the winter months and we just (finally) got a washer & dryer in the basement of our building... we don't really have space outside to hang things and it's too humid to do it inside in the summer, but definitely in the winter i'll be investing in dome drying racks. thanks!

i think we've mentioned before but we do most of our laundry by hand washer in our bathroom - diapers daily, other things as needed.

we have a spin dryer and i'd heartily recommend one for anyone washing at home or drying at home. its the size of a hamper, you plug it in and it spins your wet clothes (as in SOAKING wet) to nearly dry in 1-2 minutes. then you can hang them to completely dry in about an hour. or toss them in the dryer for what would be a fraction of the time it normally takes. easy. cheap. very green.

also the water that spins out collects in a bucket and its fun to watch.

I want a spin dryer.... tell me more!

I want a spin dryer too! That sounds awesome! What brand do you have and how much was it?

spin dryer - we got ours here:
http://www.laundry-alternative.com/spin-dryer.htm
i imagine other companies must make them too but i don't know.

it's charmingly low tech. no switches or dials. you put the clothes in, you put a bucket under its spout, you plug it in and it spins away. the bucket fills up with crazy amounts of water. when done, you just unplug. the only trick is learning to put the clothes in evenly so that it doesn't clang around while it spins.

it's brilliant for us. say, if we were washing cloth diapers, wringing dry by hand, and then hanging to dry it would take like a whole day for them to dry enough to use. instead we wash, toss in the spin dryer and hang to completely dry in like 2 hours.

Thanks for posting back Karey. Sounds great, definitely going to look into it.

We've got an awesome laundry room. (Comments welcome!)

As with Monika1, the main problem is getting it all put away. I do much better during the summer, as I am able to use the clothesline and put shirts directly on hangers to dry. The winter is a whole other story of large and looming piles!

I like the idea of an indoor line and the spin dryer! Thanks val299 & Karey!

I always try to do my laundry as often as possible, otherwise things get out of control like you said and plus I don't want to keep the clothes dirty for too long, they tend to get a smell that doesn't go out after a while. I think you should only keep things you and your family need, if your have too many clothes, you will always have this laundry trouble and pretty soon you will need new washer parts...