Doing The Washing, The Folding, The Ironing……..

Today’s post was inspired by questions sent in by Fleur who was specifically interested in:

Laundry routines, how do you get washing dry in the middle of winter, how do you keep up with the laundry folding, how to get kids (and husbands) more involved in household chores

When I read these questions I thought that I was probably not the best person to answer them! Sometimes, when we have had one of those incredibly busy weeks, you will see a mountain of washing to be folded and dealt with in our front room. I still manage to get the washing done (out of necessity) but if time is tight, folding tends to be one of the things that I drop the ball on. I am working to improve this, because the flow on effect of not having the washing up to date is never very pretty (Mum where’s my footy shorts??? Mum where’s are my school socks and so on and so on.)

But I thought I would still share what I do, as some parts do work better than others and for some I know what I should be doing, I just haven’t got implementation right yet 🙂 .

Laundry Routines

The school children have two complete uniforms (my daughter only has one pinafore though) and one sports uniform each. They all have sport on Thursday. From this I know that for them to have clean uniforms I MUST wash Tuesdays and Thursdays. Like most mum’s with a large family, I usually do the washing every day, but I like having these days in my head, so I know what my minimum requirement is to get through the week.

Drying The Washing In Winter

As you can see in the photo above, I am pretty creative where I hang my washing to dry. In winter, I find it really difficult to dry things outside, so from June until early September, I basically don’t use our clothes line. In the front room I use the curtain railing to hang things like shirts and dresses, and then we have a clothing horse semi-permanently placed over a ducted heating vent.

I also have to confess to using the dryer for socks and undies. This does make my green credentials look pretty shabby and I try and make myself feel better about it by paying for 25% Green Power, but which is not perfect, but better than nothing. I did this last winter and will do it through this winter as well. With the baby being older and a preschooler in longer hours at preschool next year, I am hoping to move away from this practice.

How Do You Keep Up With The Laundry Folding

As I noted in the intro, I only keep up with the laundry sometimes. What has worked well for me, is making sure that I fold it as soon as I take it off the clothes horse or clothes line. Just got to do it all the time!!!!!

I think I would keep up laundry folding so much more if I didn’t blog quite so much 🙂 . We do have a cool little set up for the ironing that also builds up at our house as well – an ironing trolley.

How To Get Kids (and husbands) More Involved In Household Chores

As I was writing this post, I was thinking, this is the solution. Get the kids back to folding the washing! It sounds great in theory, but in practice I haven’t been able to get it to work. I am a strong believer that kids need time to play and just hang out. With after school activities, reading, homework and other week end commitments, there isn’t too much time left over. At this point in their lives, I have decided to spare them the extra work load of folding the washing.

However, once we have folded the washing it is placed at each child’s door (it is usually folded at night) and the children need to put it away themselves. They do this moderately well, I would like it completed neater, but I have to remember they are kids. There are the occasions when I open a wardrobe to see the pile has simply been shoved in the corner, but I will call them back in to fix it, which annoys them, so they don’t tend to do it that often.

Washing and ironing is an area where my husband is really quite fabulous. He does almost all of the ironing (while watching sport on TV!!) at night and on the weekends, he will do the washing and folding while I am blogging as it is needed.

As I have started to get more serious about blogging and some other online ventures, my husband has really stepped up his support and started doing so much more in this area. It has been a gradual process and I think one of the things that really helped with this was him spending time at home during the school week with the kids and seeing what happens if this part of the household isn’t organised.

So as you can tell, I certainly have no fool proof processes to share with Fleur here! If you have some tips and tricks that have helped you tame the washing beast in your house, I think we would both love to hear them in the comments below.

This post is part of a series where I answer questions from my readers. If you have a question that you would like me to answer, please feel free to leave it in the comments below. Other posts answering reader questions can be found by clicking here: Reader Questions.