Laundry and Projects

When do you do your laundry?

On a certain day of the week?

A little bit every day?

When it piles up?

When you visit your mom?

I have always been a 'when it piles up' kind of girl. When I think of an outfit I'd like to wear, or a favorite pair of underwear that's at the bottom of the hamper, I'll throw in a load. It's not the most effective method as I actually have multiple favorite pairs of underwear, not to mention a lot of clothes I enjoy wearing. I'm too easy-to-please for this method to work in my house.

Matt is a "Set a day and stick to it" kind of guy. When we were dating Matt would actually tell me that we couldn't go out on Wednesday nights because it was laundry night (A little bit Sheldon Cooper anybody?). After I stopped working in anticipation of having Gabriel I became the primary laundry doer. We revereted back to the 'when it piles up' method and basically were almost overrun with laundry piles in our bedroom. That went on for some time, until Matt was nearly at wit's end about it and suggested I try setting a laundry day. Off and on for a year I'd do laundry on Mondays. It kind of helped... sometimes. I would forget some Mondays, or we'd go through too many clothes and I'd do a load on a Thursday and then feel like the last laundry day was too close so I'd skip a Monday. Gradually, our clothes started piling up faster and faster. By the time I was pregnant with Nathaniel, I was actually trying to maintain a two-laundry-days-a-week schedule. Some weeks it worked, some weeks it didn't.

It always astounds me how quickly laundry can pile up. It also astounds me how the bigger something grows - like the laundry pile, or a pile of dirty dishes - the less I want to do it. Am I odd? Or just lazy?

Since cleaning and organizing my bedroom the other day, the only thing out of place was a basket of Nathaniel's clean laundry that I had yet to fold. Yesterday as I was waiting for Matt to get home, I decided to quickly fold it and put it away. It was a lovely time actually... the light was gently pouring in my bedroom window, the kids were playing happily across the hall, my bedroom was a comfortable, clean space that I could do a quick chore in, and when the basket of laundry was folded - and then promptly put away - I felt really good about having it done. Since it was such a small amount it had never caused me any stress thinking about having to tackle it, and since I was able to get it all folded and away in 20 minutes, it was actually a nice bit of downtime.

Ergo, a new laundry method shall be tried in our house: each day, save perhaps Sundays, I shall wash, dry, fold and put away 1 load of laundry. Goodness knows there's enough laundry in our house to make it a daily thing. And I could even fold and put away the day before's load while that day's load is washing and drying if I don't want it to span too much of the day. But I'm gonna try it. Something's gotta give in my housekeeping, and a daily routine seems so much more manageable than a weekly pile. Hopefully this will put to end the horrible piles of folded laundry that gather in our basement, too. I'll let you know how it goes!

Besides reimagining my household organizational systems, I've had a lot of other projects on the go in the last month or two. I always seem to have so many 'other' things on the go, and often a lot of them stay unfinished for far too long.

For example, I currently have two mostly-finished quilts that I started last fall, one half-done knitted headband and two more balls of yarn waiting to be made into the same, two never-yet-touched bedside tables waiting to be stripped, sanded, and stained, a new Sunday School Curriculum to write, my family's taxes to finish and probably 4 books that I've started reading and have yet to finish. So, I think over the next week or so, I'm going to try very hard to finish some of these projects. Some of them are too big to finish in one day, like the curriculum planning or the staining project, but if I make a real effort to chip away at them, I wonder if I'll sleep better at night?

Mrs. VanderLeek ;)