I used to say, as a kind of joke, that the washing is never finished. Everybody laughs, because it’s true in every house.
It is less true than I thought. It was mostly true because I was doing four loads on a Sunday.
What a Sunday laundry day actually is
It is one hour of machine-loading spread over eleven hours of waiting, followed by a mountain.
The mountain is the problem. Four loads’ worth of clean washing arrives at once, on a Sunday evening, when everyone is tired and there is school in the morning, and it goes on the chair in the corner. And then it lives there. And by Wednesday things are being taken off the chair to be worn, which is at least efficient, and by Thursday somebody has sat on it and I no longer know what has been washed.
The pile was never a laundry problem. It was a putting-away problem, and doing all the washing at once created it.
One load
In the machine when I come down. Hung up or in the dryer by about eleven. Away before bed.
The rule that makes it work is the boring one: put away the same day. Not most days. If a load can’t be put away today, don’t start it today, and there are days when that is the right call and the machine stays empty.
A single load has an end you can see. You can hold the whole of it in your head. Four loads is a project, and projects need a project manager, and nobody in this house applied for that job.
We stopped sorting
One basket. Everything in it. Colours, darks, the lot, at thirty degrees.
Nothing has gone pink in two years. I say this as somebody who was taught to sort properly and who felt genuinely transgressive the first time.
The reason for stopping wasn’t ideological, it was that four sorted baskets meant four half-full loads and therefore no full ones, and a half-full load takes exactly as long as a full one. Anything actually risky — something new and dark red, the shirt Tom wears twice a year — goes on its own, which is about six occasions a year and not a system.
The uniform load
Midweek, on its own, both children’s uniform.
This is not about washing. It’s so that on Wednesday evening I know where every jumper is, and a missing jumper on a Thursday morning is a genuinely bad start to a day in a way that a missing anything else is not.
The airer
Winter is the part nobody writes about. We don’t run the dryer much — ours costs more per load than I want to put in writing — so from October the airer lives in front of the radiator, in the way, and it is genuinely irritating and I am not going to pretend otherwise.
The one thing that matters is putting it up in the morning. Washing hung at nine is dry by teatime. Washing hung at nine at night is damp at breakfast, gets a smell by lunchtime, and gets washed again, which is how you turn one load into two.
The relapse
For about a year I regularly left a clean load in the machine overnight, telling myself each time that it was just this once.
Twice a week. For a year. That’s roughly a hundred loads washed one and a half times each, and I would like that fact to stay in this notebook and go no further.
Things people email to ask
- Is one load of washing a day better than doing it all at the weekend?
- It has been much better here, and the reason is psychological rather than mechanical. A single load has a start and an end you can see, so it gets finished; four loads on a Sunday become a pile on a chair that is nobody’s specific job. Same total washing, but it stops being a thing hanging over the week.
- How do you actually keep on top of laundry with children?
- Put it away the same day. Washing, drying and folding are not the bottleneck — the bottleneck is the clean pile that lives on a chair for four days and then gets rewashed because somebody sat on it. If a load cannot be put away today, do not start it today. That single rule fixed more than any storage or sorting change.
- Do you need to sort laundry by colour?
- We stopped, and nothing has gone pink in two years. Modern dyes and cool washes are forgiving enough that for everyday clothes it is not worth the four half-empty baskets sorting produced. Anything genuinely risky — a new dark red thing, the once-a-year white shirt — gets washed on its own, which is about six occasions a year rather than a permanent system.
- How do you dry washing in winter without a tumble dryer?
- An airer in the warmest room, put up in the morning rather than the evening, and a window open a crack for an hour. Ours goes in front of the radiator and is in everybody’s way, which is the actual cost of not running a dryer. Things put on the airer at nine in the morning are dry by teatime; things put on it at nine at night are damp at breakfast and get rewashed.
Anna
Mid-thirties, former magazine copy editor, now works part-time from the kitchen table. Started this as a private record and only made it public because friends kept asking for the recipes.
If this was any use
The Saturday list that finally stuck
We tried a laminated star chart, a shared app, and a rota with everyone’s initials on it. The thing that worked is a piece of paper with four jobs on it, and it took us three years and about £40 of failed systems to get there.
The medicine drawer, after the winter we had
Between November and March we had two sickness bugs, one ear infection, hand foot and mouth, and a fortnight I have mostly deleted. This is what’s in the drawer now, and what I wish had been in it at three in the morning in January.
The school run, worked backwards from the door
We were late four days out of five and I kept trying to fix it by getting up earlier, which is the one thing that doesn’t work. The fix was writing down what the door actually needs and moving all of it to the night before.
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