Laundry made easier

By Aneesah, 26 Mar 18

It was only recently that I seemed to fully embrace and accept my role as a housewife slash stay-at-home mother, after 3 years of being one! ^^; I haven’t written much about life as a modern-day housewife (there’s probably only a tiny bit here) yet these things definitely deserve to be talked about. Running a household full-time with tiny children around is no easy feat, and hey — housewives can always use more representation in the online world. ^_^

What’s the big deal about laundry?

Unlike so many out there, I actually don’t hate doing laundry. I much prefer it over doing dishes (icky), cooking (sweaty) or mopping (too physically-taxing). Yet this mundane, never-ending routine does take its toll over the years. For serious, it’s 2018 — have they not invented an all-in-one laundry robot that does everything for you? :fist:

Here’s what we practice anyway:

1) We hang laundry indoors

There are a few reasons for this, eventhough we do live in a landed house with a small side-yard. I mainly can’t be bothered with the hassle of:

• opening grilles/doors
• covering myself to go outside the house
• having to constantly be alert of the weather
• enduring the outside climate 😛

So our back room is a storage room and a laundry room. We open the four windows and turn on the ceiling fan when the damp laundry is up during the day.

Side-point: I also get to sit on a bean bag when doing laundry. Yay. :boogie:

2) Every-other-day frequency

In the warmer season, our clothes can easily dry within a day, but even then I hold myself back from taking them down because… that is reserved for the next day. 🙂 So day 1 is for washing and hanging, day 2 is taking down, folding and storing — usually done mid-morning between breakfast and shower.

3) We found a clothesline made for hangers

This product was such a life-changer that I even posted the above photo on Facebook. 😆

4) We built hanger storage

This helped to streamline our system even more — previously we always had such a mess with hangers, lugging them across the house with the laundry then re-collecting them before storing them in the back room again. I decided I needed an organiser so the hangers always stay in the back room.

After Pinteresting for a good half an hour, this is the result!

I think you can tell what it is: wet-wipe containers (filled with sand), with two cardboard rolls stuck in the lids.

For hangers that don’t fit in the organiser, there’s another spot for them:

We found a metal bar from an old computer desk and attached it to our shelving with screws. Sorted!

5) We added wheels to the laundry basket

I know this is such a testament to our laziness, but I swear that growing up, we had store-bought laundry baskets with wheels on them! I just can’t seem to find them anywhere around here, so DIY it is:

Castors were purchased at Mr. DIY (we got the cheap plastic kind, considering the basket is also plastic) whereas the nuts and bolts were from another local hardware store. The process is self-explanatory and it works well — the only thing that would help reinforce the mechanism would be some washers or a separate attachment plate for each castor.

Update: we added washers to the laundry basket made from a cut-up shampoo bottle.

6) We fold clothes so that they are self-contained

Got this tip from a post on Facebook (don’t you just love random lifehacks?), nicely archived on SirapLimau if you’re interested. Essentially this method prevents your hard work from being completely undone by the little humans roaming around your house. :X

That’s it for this one! Bye.