I don’t like to do laundry. Want to know why?
Because it’s NEVER EVER DONE!!!
We wear clothes all day every day. And in our family of 6, that’s a LOT of clothes! I can spend all day sorting, and washing, and moving, and drying and moving, and folding, and putting away laundry. But at the end of the day when everyone changes for bed there are still dirty clothes. The only solution I can conceive to have every article of clothing clean at the same time is to force my family to join a nudist colony for a day.
Since I don’t feel very comfortable with this option I devised a new strategy.
First, I have to accept that it won’t ever be all the way done. I’m still working on that. Some days are better than others. But I press on.
Second, I need it to be more fun to do laundry.
When I was growing up my mom used dishpans like these: 
to sort our clothes into as she folded them. Each person had their own pan that we could easily carry to our room to transport our clean clothes. I was already using this method, but I decided to dress it up. 🙂
These are the first four I completed. I used vinyl lettering to personalize the dishpans that were already in use. To make it fun for everyone else, I asked them to choose what picture they would like next to their name. They sure had fun with this!
It only took me about an hour to make these from start to finish. But it really has made it more fun for me to fold and sort clothes! I don’t dread it like I used to. It has actually become my favorite part. And the best thing is that it is fun for the kids too. They put up less of a fight when I ask them to put away their clothes.
Third, I need moving laundry from washer to dryer to be more annoying.
I have selective short term memory loss. I tend to forget that I put a load in the washer. Two days later it is discovered, wet, horribly stinky, and still in the washer.
I don’t like doing laundry this way.
The timer on our stove top is perfect for this problem. When time is up and it beeps, it keeps beeping. It will beep until the end of time if I don’t go and shut it off. It’s in the kitchen which is half way to the laundry room from anywhere in the house.
Every time I place a load in the washer I set the timer for an hour. When the timer goes off, for the sake of my sanity, I have to get up and personally turn it off. Since I’m up anyway, I just proceed to the laundry room and move the clothes. 🙂 Easy peasy.
Fourth, I just keep working on it.
I have heard that it is best to do one load of laundry everyday. But in my world that rarely happens. Some days I just really, really don’t feel like washing laundry. Or sometimes the TV room converts to the family walk-in closet because a mountain of clean clothes camps out in there for a week (like what is pictured at the top).
Managing the laundry is a great lesson for me in perseverance. It has to be done. Somebody’s got to do it. So I bite the bullet, dig in, and dream of the day when my children will do their own laundry.
It will always be there if I don’t. (Until we join a nudist colony, that is.)
I have this problem too and I only have two kids…three if you count my husband 😉 I’ve found that the best way to start to deal with this is to weed out the extras in our wardrobes. I keep my kids to a weeks worth of outfits plus two or three church outfits. The grown-ups have what is being called on the Internet a “wardrobe capsule”. It’s roughly 40 coordinating items of clothing per season, some repeat. This doesn’t include jammies or workout clothes or accessories. I also refuse to buy almost anything that requires special cleaning like dry cleaning, except suits and a tux for My husband and a few gala gowns for me. Cutting back on our possessions has helped our life in huge ways! We’re going full-on minimalist!