I don’t enjoy doing laundry, but I don’t despise it either. I have streamlined the process in our home to make life easier. I don’t like to waste time doing things I don’t enjoy, but some things are necessary, such as laundry. Here are some of my laundry hacks:

  1. I don’t sort colors (Gasp). No really, I don’t sort by color. I use color grabber/ color catcher sheets. I also wash all loads on cold wash (unless it is something that I think needs hot/sanitizing in which case I would sort the item out). These amazing little sheets (similar size to that of a dryer sheet) are thrown in with every load of laundry and they grab any excess dye that may bleed from fabrics. You would be shocked how well these work and how much your clothing all bleed colors. For general day to day laundry I fill the machine to the max load capacity, ignoring the colors, and use these color absorbing sheets to make my life easier. It also saves energy and water as I have to do fewer loads. These color absorbing sheets pay for themselves in savings! Pictured below are the two brands I use. The Color Grabber costs less and work just as well as the Shout product, so I pick them up when I see them. The only exception of sorting is for delicates and when I want to darken a load of blacks/dark blues. I will explain more below.image
  2. Woolite: I use woolite about once a week for delicates. Usually it’s because I need to wash some of Brielle’s nicer dresses. I have several hand wash/ delicate cycles on my machine so they are super helpful in saving time, as I don’t ever have to actually hand wash anything in a sink since I have owned these machines.image
  3. Woolite Dark Wash: I use this product when I have a load of darks that I want to refresh their color. The detergent itself is tinted. In my experience it makes black clothing and dark blue clothing have more vibrancy. It is a great way to refresh dark clothing that has lost color because of being washed too much.
  4. I don’t pretreat stains. It has to be a pretty blatant stain that I happen to see while throwing items in the wash in order to use a pretreatment spray like Shout. I prefer to save my time and simply add a scoup of Biz to every load of laundry. My friend Wendy told me about this product at book club years ago when we were discussing stain removal. I was explaining how baby stuff (breast milk, formula, and baby food) stain everything so easily and I can’t get the stains out with all the variety of stain removing products I have used. She told me about Biz and I have been using it ever since. It is not an expensive product either. I think everyone should use it! I think they aren’t because they don’t know about it. If you have kids you should be using it! It gets out the stains that you may have forgotten to pretreat or didn’t even know were there. Even my nanny asked me how I was able to get the kid’s clothes so clean, as they are filthy at the end of each day. I told her it was the Biz. Biz is a powder and you simply add it to the load of laundry along with regular laundry soap. image
  5. Tide: I have tried just about every laundry soap out there and my favorite is the Tide powder. I found it to be the best match for our level of grime and the machines we own.
  6. Wrinkle Release: I don’t iron that often. If I can get it out of the dryer and hang the item before it wrinkles, then great, I saved myself some time. If not, I use wrinkle release spray. I love this product. It works especially well on cottons, such as polo shirts, which I seem to wash a lot of each week. After I hang the item on a hanger if there are wrinkles I spray the wrinkle release and then straighten the clothing to sort of pull out the wrinkles. I may even run my hand over the garment to smooth over any wrinkles or bumps which also helps the spray to better absorb into the fabric. It works great and has probably saved me literally days in the amount of time added up in which I would have been ironing.
  7. My sorting method is two baskets. I keep two baskets in constant use in my laundry room. The basket on the washer is for dirty clothing. Even my kids know that is where the dirty laundry goes and will help put items into the dirty basket when asked. The other basket is on the dryer. This is my “wrinkled basket”. Anything that requires some wrinkle release or heaven forbid some ironing, goes in that basket. I don’t have counter space so the clean laundry tends to get moved out, folded, and put away more quickly because there isn’t space in the laundry room for it to sit for long. image