Washing Struggles

Do you wash all the clothes? Is laundry duty split? Do you wash, dry, fold AND put away? Do you separate whites from darks? Cold water only?

Laundry is a tedious yet required task. Similar to dishes in my house, it tends to be a source of “nagging” on my part. I’ve grown to accept it, and it’s often humorous (when I’m not tired and cranky). Between two adults and two kids, we have our regular laundry fill. Although, two adults wear uniforms every day- so it could be worse.

Where am I going with this? Husband thinks my blog space is to complain about him, and although I do highlight some minor frustrations, I find they are debates that most, if not all couples face. Sharing spaces, chores, and responsibilities brings a new realm of compromise. Similar to washing dishes, everyone does laundry a different way. Sure, there’s probably a right way, but have you seen all the buttons on modern machines these days?! Who actually has time to learn them all?! Can I just press a wash button and come back in an hour to dry?

In my house, we worked through the differences on HOW to wash the clothes, moved on to the drying (since I continually shrunk his clothes), and now we are currently at the ‘PLEASE fold and put away your clothes’ instead of dumping them on the bed/ shoving them on the floor/ dog uses as a pillow/ wash-rinse-repeat.

Don’t get me wrong. I have my weeks of living out of laundry baskets at a time, buying more laundry baskets to accommodate the weeks everyone in the house is- but I often try to spend the extra five minutes to put clothes away. Again, similarly to dishes- unless that five minutes is spared early on, you’re left with a mound of questionably clean clothes mixed with dirty and ultimately requires another wash. Waste of time, waste of water, waste of detergent, and energy. Pretty much, if you don’t put your clothes away- you’re killing the planet (or some might say).

Again, this is not my avenue to publicly shame husband for leaving his clean clothes in the dryer (slowly raking essentials out to wear), or to publicly shame him for making a dog bed out of clean clothes- this is a way to highlight a simple ‘chore’ with a difference of opinion I know I’m not alone on. How do you launder??