Behold, I now posses the knowledge of the perfect laundry sorting to ensure clothes are being washed thoroughly without being damaged. Yes, I have mastered laundry. Read on to find the secret.
I have been washing my own clothes for as far back as I can remember, but I was always too overwhelmed by the care instruction tags to ever really organize my loads. Does it wash cold, warm, or hot? Delicate cycle, cotton cycle, or permanent press cycle? Can I use bleach or do I have to use bleach alternative? Will it bleed on to other clothes? Will other clothes bleed on to it? Is it too heavily soiled to wash with other clothes? Then there are the drying groups. Can I use high heat or do I have to use low? Is that what "tumble dry low" means? Can I fudge with medium heat? Should I use an automatic dry sensor setting or timed setting? If it says "dry flat" or "hang dry," can I just tumble dry it on the "air dry only" setting? Have you ever looked at a tag that only uses symbols? Have you noticed different symbols can mean the same thing?
Can you imagine how many bins, or bags I would have to purchase to get all of my clothes into the right group? Then I would have to check every tag every time until I learned which clothes were which. What is worse is that I have never had enough clothes that I would actually have complete loads and would end up combining loads anyway, and that would lead to another dilemma of what groups can be washed with which.
My solution then was simple. If it is white enough to bleach, it is a white. If it is dark enough to bleed, it is a dark. Anything else is a medium. Darks are cold/cold, mediums are warm/cold, whites are hot/cold and I thrown a coin to decide between permanent press and cotton. Drying is always out dry. Boy, was I mistreating my clothes.
All of this changed when Emily and I moved into our new home. Between the honeymoon, the movers bringing all of our packed textiles, and the two weeks it took to complete the laundry room in our spare time, we had a LOT of laundry to get through. Emily and I had agreed that we wanted a hamper system to presort our clothes to make laundry easier, especially when we have a family to wash for. I figured that then was as good of time as any to take my time and sort each article of clothing according to its care instructions; everything would get washed correctly and moving forward we would have our hamper system.
3 piles turned into 6, turned into 9, turned into a huge mess and I started to forget which pile was which. I knew that having 24 hampers would not make laundry any easier so I started looking for trends in the clothes to figure out how to consolidate it to only 3 hampers. I decided I needed and pen and a piece of paper to figure this one out and I started writing down the common denominators for each group.
It suddenly became clear that aside from a couple pairs of jeans, everything was "tumble dry low" or air dry - and air dry is not a word in Jacksonville. The "air dry" were "delicate" and "delicate" were "cold." Now, not all me "cold" were "delicate", but there were not enough of them to justify their own load, so I created a group for "delicate" and "cold" which would be dried as "tumble dry low." Everything else was "wash warm" and "tumble dry low" or some sort of evil mutation of the word. To solve the non-chlorine bleach problem, we are not going to use chlorine bleach on any article of clothing.
The closing results:
Hamper 1: Cold and/or Delicate - wash cold/cold, tumble dry low.
Hamper 2: Darks not in hamper 1 - wash warm/cold, tumble dry low.
Hamper 3: Mediums and whites not in hamper 1 - wash warm/cold, separate whites to use non-chlorine bleach when needed, tumble dry low.
Now everything is washed correctly!
owned enough clothes for the loads to ever
