A big part of anyone’s cleaning routine is laundry. Laundry takes hours to complete, demands that you pay attention to it, and goes sour if you leave it unattended for too long. Laundry needs babysitting.
For a long time, I was a big fan of daily laundry. Every day I would try to do one load of laundry from start to finish, including putting it away. We moved, and our rental home does not have air conditioning, so I started doing a laundry day on the coolest day of the week so I wasn’t constantly heating up our house.
There are benefits to both methods of tackling laundry. There are also some pretty serious disadvantages.
Benefits and Pitfalls of Daily Laundry
- You can almost always wear your favorite shirt!
- You don’t run out of important items like uniforms. Or underwear.
- You can build laundry into your daily routine.
- It doesn’t take as long as the laundry day method. Putting away clean clothes is easy.
- It’s easy to forget about your laundry until the next day. Then it’s stinky, and you have to wash it again. This wastes time, water, and detergent.
Benefits and Pitfalls of Laundry Day
- It’s less likely that you’ll forget about your laundry if you’re dedicating a whole day to it.
- You start to see which items your family actually wears.
- It’s easier to see what items never get worn. After a while, it helps you make decluttering decisions much more easily.
- Once it’s done, it’s done. Then you have six glorious laundry-free days until your next laundry day.
- You’re more likely to question whether or not you should wash something. If you might want to wear it later in the week, you’ll want to keep it out of the laundry bin. This could end up reducing your volume of laundry.
- It takes for-ev-er. You have to stay home to get it done so you can watch for things like dryer fires or flooding washing machines.
- You may have to do emergency loads of laundry throughout the week. If someone gets sick, you’re short a uniform, or you decide that you really want to wear a certain t-shirt tomorrow. These emergencies tend to come up every week for us.
Now that I’ve tried Daily Laundry and Laundry Day, I’m having trouble deciding which to use. The weather is cooler, so heating up the house isn’t an issue. I’m leaning toward Laundry Day because I love to have all of our clothes washed and put away. However, I’ll probably still have to do a booster load at some point during the week to keep up with clean uniforms for everyone.
Do you do Daily Laundry or Laundry Day? Or do you have an entirely different method?
This post is linked up to Thrifty Thursday.
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