A laundry hack that gave me back hours

Picture the scene; it's Monday morning, i have 4 children including new baby with reflux. I’ve managed to wash and dry endless loads of laundry this weekend but now all the clean washing is piled sky high in a mountain on the floor. Its filled with bibs, muslins, school uniforms and an entire families supply of pants and socks. My son is shouting at me that he is going to be late for school unless i find him a pair of socks from somewhere within laundry mountain. I start rummaging through and am silently screaming that every day the laundry feels like an impossible feat, one i can never catch up with, one that is constantly humming away in the back of mind.

And i snap.

I cannot spend another week desperately trying to fold and pack away 6 peoples worth of laundry into the bedrooms only then to spend every day running up and down the stairs to get a new babygrow for the sicky baby or another t-shirt for the dirty toddler. I cannot spend another morning frantically searching for school socks!

So i ask my husband to build me a laundry station.

This quite literally changes my life.

Every member of the household now has a laundry box - my eldest son even printed off and laminated labels for each person. Every time i wash and dry a load of laundry i simply throw it into their designated box. No ironing, almost no folding, just throw it straight in.

Every Sunday my two eldest children, take their laundry boxes up to their room and pack away all their clothes ready for the week. Every Sunday they now have clean school uniform, pants and socks, ready and waiting.

For the two smaller children, i don’t even pack their clothes away. I leave their clothes, downstairs in their boxes. This was a game changer. Whoever made the rule that clothes belong in a wardrobe in our bedrooms? My refluxy baby at the time did not need clothes upstairs, hidden away, she needed 10 outfits close at hand, for her to be sick on every 5 minutes. My potty training toddler did not need pants in his bedroom, he needs pants near to the toilet so he can change immediately after an accident.

I realised that by keeping everyday t-shirts, shorts, pants, bibs ect downstairs, i would save myself rushing upstairs umpteem times a day, or rummaging through laundry mountain, and therefore eliminate a huge mental and physical waste of time.

I keep special clothes upstairs, a nice dress, a shirt. But everything else stays downstairs, in their laundry box, close by and easy to find.

You have no idea just how much this changed my life on a daily basis. No longer do i spend hours stressing that i have not packed washing away, or spend a whole afternoon folding 6 peoples clothes. No longer do i search for socks on a Monday morning whilst feeling like a failure that i can’t keep up. I simply wash a load of laundry and spend 2 minutes throwing clothes into 6 boxes. Then the job is done.

My mental load of laundry has been erased.