Time Saving Laundry Ideas

If you like most of us, the laundry is an ongoing task. You want minimize your time spent and maximize the output. We asked Cozi users to share some of their best laundry ideas with us.

Here are some great ideas you told us about to get the laundry clean (and put away!) more efficiently:

• After washing and drying sheets and pillow cases- I fold the sheets and put them in the pillow cases so everything is together when i need to pull them out and use them again. Works well with the kids, too. They can find all of their bed sheets and we don't have to worry about losing them!!
• For ease with laundry, each member of the house has different colored hangers. When the laundry baskets go down to the laundry room, so do the empty hangers. When the clean clothes are hanging, it's easy to match all the same hangers to that person's closet.
• With three boys, there is a lot of laundry. If I wash them all at once, it takes quite awhile to figure out whose stuff is whose, especially the socks since the middle child's feet are larger than the oldest. Also, T-shirts start looking like the same size and hard to remember whose is whose. So, I just said, when your basket gets full, bring it to the laundry room. I then wash each child's clothes separately, one dark load, one lights and whites. If need a little more to fill tub, I will add some of my husbands or my clothes since they are easy to distinguish from our children's clothing.
• Instead of putting laundry baskets in the bathrooms or bedrooms, I put them in the laundry room. Everyone has to bring their laundry there or it doesn't get done! I have three baskets, one for whites, one for mediums, and one for bright colors. That way when I get ready to do laundry, it's already sorted for me and I don't have to go around the house collecting laundry.
• My big family has implemented the "dot system". It can be difficult for us all to keep track of which clothing items belong to which child or teen when putting clothes away, since several of the kids wear similar sizes. What I did was this: Take a permanent black Sharpie marker, and put ONE DOT on the label of each clothing item of the oldest (or biggest) boy. Then, put TWO DOTS on the next oldest (or biggest) boys clothing labels, THREE DOTS on the next one down, and so on. Do the same thing with the girls (ONE DOT for the oldest/biggest girl). This way, when the oldest child outgrows a clothing item that's still in great shape, all you do is add ONE MORE dot to his outgrown clothing labels, and pass it down to the next oldest child (who now has TWO DOTS on his passed-down clothes). This has soooo simplified our lives! Everyone knows what belongs to who, the clothes get put away properly, and most of all… it's EASY!