transcript

Speaker 1:
[00:00] Welcome to A Slob Comes Clean, the podcast. I am Dana K. White. I share my personal desolvification process. As I figure out ways to keep my own home under control, I share the truth about cleaning and organizing strategies that actually work in real life for real people, people who don't love cleaning and organizing. Thanks for joining me today. This is podcast number 506, and I am going to call it Your Laundry Questions Answered, because that's what I'm doing. I'm answering questions around the theme of laundry. So I will go over briefly here at the beginning, the very most basics of my laundry strategy that I have found works really well for me and for other people whose brains work like mine, which is different from what most of the experts will tell you to do. But I'm not going to go all the way into that because there are other podcasts, like a lot of other podcasts, where I talk you through Laundry Day. Spoiler, that's what I do. I do Laundry Day. But there are many other podcasts on there. We're going to link in the show notes to some other podcasts where I've talked about laundry. Also, in my book, How to Manage Your Home Without Losing Your Mind, which is available at most libraries. I mean, also, I'd love for you to buy it, but you know what I mean, like there's no barriers for you to be able to read it. But in that book, there are two chapters on libraries. There are two chapters on laundry. The first one, I explain how to do laundry day. The second one, I answer all your objections to laundry day. So I kind of am going to be answering some, wait, what about this? What about this? Questions around laundry and laundry day, that routine over the course of today's thing. But here's the basics of laundry. For me, I tried to do the one load a day because that is what the experts said I should do. That is what I believe naturally organized people are generally able to do. And even people who aren't naturally organized, a lot of them can make the one load a day thing work for them. Great. If you want to try that, do it. If that's what you think you should do, go for it. I tried so hard. If you have ever read my blog backwards, if you've ever read from the beginning, like from August of 2009 all the way through, as I was figuring this stuff out, I was not teaching anything to anybody at all in the beginning. But in the beginning, I was adding a habit each week. There are so many different weeks where I tried to add doing a load of laundry every day as a habit, and I couldn't do it. And then I'd try the next week and I was like, so this time I'm going to, I remember, in our old house, the house where I started this whole dislobification process, our bedroom door, my husband's in my bedroom door, was in this very, it wasn't really a hallway. It was just kind of a, like, here's a door to the kitchen, here's a door to our room, and here's a door in between them to the laundry room. And so I tried purposely at night, leaving the laundry room door open, so that when I stumbled out of my room in the morning, I would quite literally run into that door. Like, I was trying to get myself to remember to do this thing. Well, first of all, my husband usually gets up before me. We get up, yeah, sometimes it's me, but usually it's him. He was like, what? You know, so he didn't have the same desire to get this figured out that I did with the laundry at that time. But I tried everything. I tried setting alarms. I tried so many ways to, which you can read about there if you go back and read the blog, but I tried so many ways to figure out how to get my laundry, to work one load a day. I constantly forgot. I would start out, like in the morning, okay, okay, I'm doing my thing. One of the things, I'm going to start a load of laundry. Well, I would go to start a load of laundry and find a load that had been in there since the day before, or maybe days before that. It kind of started to smell a little funny. So I had to rewash it again. And then I rewashed that same load and I never actually made progress on laundry. Finally went back to doing it the Ma Ingalls way of doing laundry on laundry day. I mean, this is kind of how people have been doing it for a lot of life, right? And I know that we don't have to boil it over the fire with lye soap and all that kind of stuff. I don't know, I don't remember what she did, but laundry day worked for me because it gives me a focus for that day. And somehow my brain is better able to know that today the thing I'm doing is laundry. I'm able to remember to stay on task and get those loads changed over better than just once a day. And anyway, all kinds of things there. Just remember, it takes three laundry days to actually appreciate laundry day. The first laundry day, you are making up for being behind on laundry. So you're going to gather everything in your house, all the clothes in your house, sort them into piles. If you don't believe in sorting, great, put them into piles, whatever, and start working your way through those piles. But anything that's newly dirtied goes into the hampers or wherever you ideally put dirty clothes for the next laundry day. Don't add newly dirtied clothes to those piles. That's how you end up in the laundry never ends cycle. So you put newly dirty clothes, wait for next laundry day, but you work through all those piles. It might take you six days. Laundry day the first time could be laundry week. But the key is on that eighth day, on the same, like if you did it on Monday, on the next, even though you don't finish till Saturday night, on the next Monday, when you've only not been doing laundry for less than 24 hours or whatever, start laundry day again. That second week is when you know what one week's worth of laundry looks like for your family. I know some of you are like, I can do that. I can do that. My family wears this blah, blah, blah. I am saying as the person who was always behind on laundry, I had no idea what one week's worth of laundry was for my family, but I didn't know that I didn't know what one week's worth of laundry was for my family and how many piles that made and how much time it took to do those. I had no idea, but I didn't know that I had no idea, okay? So I'm telling you, that's the beauty of starting again exactly a week from when you first did that one, even though you're so sick and tired of laundry. The reason you do it exactly a week later is because that you've been putting dirty clothes into next week's laundry day spot for a week. And now you know that second laundry day is when you learn what one week's worth of laundry is for your family. Of course, it's going to change a little bit here and there, but it will be shocking. If you have been behind on laundry for ever or forever, then you have no idea. And I know you don't believe me, but this is part of the experiment for you to see if it's true for yourself. It's true for you. I promise. Third Laundry Day is where the magic happens, because that is the laundry day where you realize, oh, now I have confirmation of how much less laundry there is when it's only one week's worth instead of months worth of being behind and doing emergency loads and all that. And on that third laundry day, you have experienced the biggest perk of laundry, and that is of laundry day. Never worrying about having clean clothes. Always having clean underwear, clean socks, clean clothes to wear. Always having what you need clean and ready to go for a week. Not feeling guilty about not doing laundry for an entire week. All week, you may have been like, I don't have to do laundry. It's not laundry day. That experience of that week of not feeling guilty about not doing laundry and because you have laundry day, okay, it's not laundry day. I don't have to do it. I don't have to feel bad about not doing it. And you actually have what you need. Totally will change everything. And then over time, you're gonna go, oh, now I know what our favorite clothes are. I know which clothes we only ever wore because we were out of everything else, but I didn't ever put it together before because we were always running out of things. And so we always did wear of it. And now I know when everything's clean every week, these are the things that get worn first pick every time. Okay, that is the basics of Laundry Day. That is the context around which these questions are being asked. Okay, they're being asked of me, and I do Laundry Day, I teach Laundry Day. So therefore, yeah. Now, I just said I do Laundry Day. It's different now. It's just my husband and me. And so, I do Laundry Day, but it's not necessarily always on the, it's kind of like, oh, we need to do a Laundry Day. Let's do Laundry Day. Okay? So it is different now. It was different when my kids were teenagers and they all did their own laundry. So all of those things come into play, but Laundry Day, I'm telling you, if you are overwhelmed by laundry, Laundry Day is the way to do it. Okay, here we go. Do you use your washer and dryer outside of Laundry Day? I mean, do you ever wash anything in between Laundry Days, or does everything wait until the start of Laundry Day? Are bedding, towels, rags, and mop pads also part of your Laundry Day? Here are some other things that are tripping me up. Items used occasionally like Halloween costumes, Christmas sweaters, sleeping bags, or swimsuits. Very dirty clothes such as those spilled milk or baby pee. Extra dirty clothes like those with baby poop or vomit. It just makes me giggle. Not giggle because I know it's hard in the moment, but I'm the old lady now looking back going, aw, yeah, should I do special loads for these or wait until laundry day? You can do whatever you want. The reason I like laundry day is that the rest of the week, the washer and dryer are free and available for these emergency loads. So I think what's happening here is the thing that happens with so many of our people, and that is you're trying to wrap your brain around laundry day, and all of the what ifs and the possibilities and the, oh, this could happen, things are coming up before you actually try laundry day. But what happens when you do laundry day is, you know, everything that's dirty on laundry day gets washed. Everything. So if a baby pee thing hasn't been washed yet, yes, it's going to go in with laundry day. But when you get that routine down, your washer is available. Now, I fully understand there are some of you who go elsewhere to do laundry, and you don't have a washing machine at home. And I know if you live outside the US, you probably don't have a dryer. I get it, right? But this, which I have talked before, I know I have. I can't remember where. But I have talked before with people who don't have dryers and how they made laundry day work. But anyway, when it's open and it's free, something happens and you realize, I've got this extra dirty load. I've got the kids fell in mud pedals or purposely jumped in mud pedals or whatever. This happened. The baby was sick. Somebody peed in the bed or whatever, like sleeping bags that we took camping and now they all smell like smoke or whatever. Campfire smoke. So that happens. Life happens. There is something about being like, oh, I'm just going to throw this in the washing machine. And the ease of that, because what used to happen is these emergency loads would happen. The campfire smoke smelling sleeping bags happen. And I'm like, uh, I need to wash these. But there was this guilt over the fact that I needed to wash a ton of other things, too. I needed to wash. There was just piles and piles of things that needed to be washed. And it felt like, uh, do I have to these? I really want to wash these, but I can't justify washing these when if I'm going to be washing something, it needs to be these things that we need. Like, there is a mental block that happens there. But when you don't have that guilt and it's just available, well, then you can just start in there and it's quick and it's easy and there's nothing to rearrange and move around or figure out how to work it in. It's like, it's just available, which then makes these, these moments of, um, you know, Christmas sweaters that need to be, you know, maybe they're from the 1980s and they, you're not willing to wash them with anything else because they're probably going to bleed a little bit. You know, like the, all these different things that happen, they're less overwhelming because laundry in general is under control. I'm good. I don't have to be doing any laundry right now because it's not laundry day. And I've got laundry under control, so we have everything we need. And I have the confidence that the next laundry day is going to be when I'll take care of all this. I can do the thing that I maybe would have felt like, oh, I just got to throw that in the pile and then do the more important things first. So it really does free up a lot of that. In your five step process, how do you deal with dishes and laundry or clothing that you find around the house? I want to do progress and only progress, and I usually consider the easy stuff that has a defined place. But when I take it there now, if the dishes are already stacked on the counter or the dishwasher is running, so I can't load them, then I end up leaving the kitchen off worse. Same idea with adding the laundry to a full hamper. Do you try to one-in-one out things in the easy stuff stage, or do you accept that dirty clothing or dirty dishes can just join in the queue for the next cycle and get back to the spot you're decluttering? A lot of this. Okay. So I know this talks about dishes too. This is one of the reasons why when people ask, where do I start? If you're asking where to start decluttering, I'm going to tell you the visibility role. Okay. But if you're asking me, where do I start just in general, my house? All of this is hard. Everything is hard. I say to start with the habits. Okay. So you start with the very most basic, most important habit, which is dishes. Laundry is one of those things that you also tackle in that, and then you declutter as you can in there. But if you have the dishes under control, meaning it's only a load of dishes that runs in the dishwasher every day or a load that gets hand washed and then put on the drying rack, okay? When you have dishes under control, when you have laundry under control, then just like we were talking about before, newly dirtied laundry going in the hamper does not feel like adding this huge thing to an already desperate, terrible situation. Okay, if laundry is not under control, kind of like, you know, oh, something comes along and I've got to deal with it. What do I do? It doesn't feel that way anymore when you're like, oh, I can add this to the hamper, and that's not a problem because I have laundry under control. Or I run across something that's kind of like we were talking about before, that's kind of the sleeping bags that smell like campfire smoke. And I've got to, you know, they've got shoved over here and I need to deal with it. Okay, well, I can deal with that. I can run a load and get these washed because the washing machine is free. So I'm saying, so like having the routine takes care of that. The thing with the dishes I'm going to say to you though, even though this is a podcast about laundry, I have to say this. The thing about the dishes, if the dishes are under control, okay, which they need to be, like that's the first place to start. Like even before you do any decluttering, do the dishes, declutter as much as you can. The next day, you're like, oh, I'm gonna declutter again today. Oh, I'm gonna do the dishes again first. But it's not gonna take that long to do the dishes because it's only one day's worth of dishes now, right? If you run into this situation where you're like, okay, the dishwasher's running or the drying rack is full, and I need to do the dishes, okay, so that would be a one in one out if the drying rack is full. So the drying rack, I can put away a dish that's already dry, or I can just grab a dish towel and dry this dish and put it away, okay? But I think what's happening here is the idea that what do I do, because I can't do it perfectly. In the situation, and this is something I've had to try to teach my own kids, this is how you keep a kitchen from ever getting out of control is to not put it in the sink, but hand wash the one dish so that it can go straight to the drying rack if there's room or dry it and put it all the way away. So that you don't end up, oh, the dishes are done, but now I'm starting to add a bunch of things to the sink, okay? So, but also know that once you get that dishes routine, it's again, like we were talking about in the last question, it's not going to feel as overwhelming, okay? But I would say wash the single dish, but also with the clothes, know that once you have laundry under control, and laundry is a very, very worthy thing of getting under control, because it's going to help with all sorts of decluttering along the way. You're going to be able to declutter clothing so much more easily, like we talked about. And once you get it under control, it's not going to feel that way to add something to the hamper. I think you're borrowing some trouble there. How do you avoid the pile of laundry on the floor next to the hamper? Like the clothes that aren't dirty enough to go in the hamper for the wash, and you will rewear that week, but you don't want to put it away with your unworn clothes. My husband and I are both guilty of these piles, and I'm afraid we're doing it with our toddlers' clothes too. I definitely don't like the idea of adding another hamper to each room for this category. We really do rewear clothes a lot and do a good job of putting the truly dirty and the hamper separate from them. Pile system almost works, but it's ugly and it takes up space. I would say I'm anti-pile for myself. Piles work in an ideal situation where I'm always going to, but they never work. They don't work for me, because what happens is if I was to put things in a pile next to the hamper with this idea, my brain would just be like, pile, throw, clothes, at, and I would forget, and they would all get mixed up. So what I say here, I used to have a chair that I would put clothes on like that, that were like, oh, it's not quite, it's not dirty, I could rewear it, but I don't actually want to hang it back in my closet. I have gotten more to the point now, especially with my closet having so many fewer clothes in it, I have gotten more to the point now where I just go ahead and hang it back up. If I'm going to wear it, I'm just going to go ahead and hang it back up, because it eliminates that middle location, which is where bad things always happen for me. But what I recommend here, instead of the pile, instead of the chair, because what happened is I would pile things on the chair, and then they would be there so long that I'd be like, where is that shirt, I haven't seen it in months. Well, it's because it was the bottom of the pile that had just grown and grown and grown. So if you cannot bring yourself to just put it straight back into the closet or the drawer or whatever, a hanging rack that just sets over the top of your door, I've gotten these at TJ Maxx, you can get them on Amazon. I mean, like anywhere, they're gonna have that. But like a hook over the door, set of like four hooks, and that is where you hang the stuff that you're like, oh, we want to rewear this, but I kind of want it to air out a little bit. I don't want to put it straight back into the closet. Once when you do that, but you have to realize that that hook, that four hook thingy is a container. It's a limit and you have to treat it as a limit. So you don't just keep hanging things on top of it because that's what is basically like a pile. So instead, it's like, okay, I have to, I want to hang something up that I'm not sure. Oh, there's no room on there. Then this item needs to go back in the closet because it's been hanging up here long enough that it needs to go back in the closet now. Can you please give advice on procrastic clutter? For example, mending. Garment seeding alterations, when that is holding up, decluttering the laundry. How do you move forward when Take It There Now involves a project with four question marks? Oh, but they said they're from Australia. Should I read it again with an Australian accent? I won't do that. It's very tempting. Okay, procrastic clutter, in case you're new here. Procrastic clutter is the stuff that you know needs to be done and you know what to do with it, but you put off doing it because you're like, that's not a real use of my decluttering energy. It's that idea that I'm going to declutter today. I need to do the big stuff. I need to do the stuff that counts. But the problem is if you skip procrastinate clutter, you can do a lot of work, and your space is still going to look messy, which is then going to discourage you from decluttering again the next time, because you're like, well, what is the point? It never looks any better. Now, the good news is when you get daily habits down, there's a lot less procrastinate clutter, because a lot of the daily habits deal with procrastinate clutter. Oh, there was something else I was going to say about the laundry hamper one before. The laundry hamper thing. The first thing I thought of was, how do you avoid the pile of laundry on the floor next to the hamper with the five-minute pickup? That five-minute pickup every day of, we've got to focus and deal with the thing. If you're just talking about things that missed the hamper and ended up on the floor, that five-minute pickup is the time to do that. Is the ideal that you just put things straight in the hamper? Of course it is. But the five-minute pickup helps you deal with the things that didn't happen in the most ideal way. Okay. So we're going back to talk about Procrasta Clutter. So that is what Procrasta Clutter is. But she's talking about projects, specifically when Take It There Now involves a project. What I say in this situation is to remember that finishing a project counts as decluttering. It's not always possible to stop and finish it right then. So we're going to talk about that too. But I do want to remind you that finishing a project counts as decluttering. If it is a pair of jeans with a broken zipper, and you know how to change out the zipper, you know what, you have the zipper, you know how to do it, but it's something that's going to take some time. If you finish the project and you replace the zipper, then it's no longer a project, it's just a pair of jeans that needs to go where you would look first for jeans. So it can go to its final home once you finish the project. You've got to learn to count finishing projects as de-cluttering, but you can't always do that. So what do you do? Well, you go, if I was looking for mending work to do, or alteration work to do, where would I look for it first? If I was like, oh, I've got some time today, I'm going to get some of my mending done. Where would you look first for the things that needed to be mended? Whatever that place is, there's not like a right place. Oh, you need to put it in a basket next to your chair in the living room so that you'll do this while you watch TV. I don't know. It really only matters where you would look for it first when you decided to do some mending. And it's not the same place where you look for the jeans. Because if you put it in the place where you look for jeans, you're going to end up constantly going and being like, oh, yeah, these jeans. Oh, the zipper is broken. I got to mend those. So instead, it's, where would I look first for jeans that, or whatever needs mending? Take it to that place, and the size of that space determines how many mending projects you can have. What? Dana, you can't limit how many things you're going to fix. You have to limit how many things you're going to fix. I'm not limiting it. The space is limiting it. But the space is the thing that demonstrates to you in physical, demonstratable, observable facts that if you're not getting the mending actually done, it demonstrates to you that you're not getting the mending actually done. Okay? I know. I don't like hearing that either. But the space where you would look for mending, let's say it is the basket next to your living room chair because you do sit down to watch TV and think, oh, I'm going to do a little bit of mending. Great. Like, let's say that's the spot where it would be. That basket is a container. It contains, it serves as a limit, as a boundary that determines how much of the stuff you can keep. And here's what happens when you take it to that spot and you see that this basket is already full. That is when you have the moment of realizing, oh, I have to remove something from this basket in order to put this here, which either is going to make you realize, oh, those toddler genes that I was going to hem because they were too long are now way too short, even not hemmed, because they've been in that basket for two and a half years. Like the fact that it is a limit and you acknowledge it's a limit and you treat it as a limit shows you the thing that you don't necessarily know or notice before, because otherwise it's like, oh, it's mending, it's mending, it goes in there. But if you just say, oh, it's mending, mending goes there and you don't use boundaries, that's how you end up in situations. And I know that some of y'all have dealt with exactly this. And I haven't dealt with this on mending, but I've dealt with it on many, many, many other things because I don't mend. You end up with a basket that gets piled so high that it's higher than the actual chair it's sitting next to, that ends up toppling and turning into a huge pile that takes up a huge chunk of the room and is so completely overwhelming that I can't even think about mending because anytime I think about mending, I'm too overwhelmed to even dig through that pile. There's so many things I would have to figure out first to even be able to, right? And so those are the things that happen if you don't have it as a boundary, but when you have it as a boundary, it naturally reveals, okay, I don't have room for everything. You know what? I put those socks in here to darn because I like darnin socks. But since something has to leave, my brain realizes those socks, even when they didn't need to be darned, were itchy or too tight or whatever, or they've got six holes in them. And I don't want to do six different holes. Right? Like, so that is how it reveals to you what needs to go, what I don't like as much, what isn't as great, because the size of the basket is the size of the basket. Whether I like it or not, it is. Seems like I was gonna say something else. Oh, or you get to that basket, and you look at it and you think, oh, okay, there's not enough room in here for all of the things that I, you know, for this new thing that I'm taking there now to put in the place where I would look for it first, because this is where I look for stuff to mend. I get to this place and I go, oh, there's not enough room for it. Is there anything in here that actually could be done in a matter of just a few minutes? Oh, actually, this one right here, all it needed was a quick little stitch. I can do that, and it's done, and then that thing is no longer cluttered because it can go to its other real home, where you look for a perfectly functional skirt or whatever. But when you're just thinking, oh, it's mending, I need to do that later. I'll do that when I'm really thinking mending. But it naturally reveals the things that could be done lickety-split if I have to have something that needs to leave here. Okay? All right. One more question on this around the general topic of laundry. I am struggling with laundry because there are shirts with grease stains that I keep rewashing and drying because I forget to treat the stains. Then I'm not wanting to even do laundry because I'm afraid of finding those shirts with stains. Should I just throw away the shirts or can I get those stains out after all these washes? It's holding me up and I hate doing laundry. I completely understand this mindset because it feels like if you go do this now, every time you do laundry, you're going to run across these and that's going to be like facing failure. And so that's painful. And so you just avoid it. I totally understand. However, you don't want it this way because you're asking a question. You don't want it to be this way. The question of can I get these stains out after all these washes? I do not teach stain removal because I really don't know. But this is a time where doing a quick Google search, which I would probably I think I've seen like the put like before 2023 or something so that you kind of get it without the AI stuff that could be wrong. But if you do a quick search to say, how to remove grease stains after an item of clothing has already gone through the dryer. Like I'm not going to do that for you because I'm wanting, the point here is not how to do that. The point is this is holding you back. This is stopping you. And so it feels like, oh, that is something completely separate to go find out how to deal with this grease stain. But in reality, that is the take it there now. Because if I will do that search and find out if it's possible or not, and if it is possible, if it's something I already have access to, to use to do it, and if it is possible, if it's something that I actually want to do and can do, and it's worth it to me to do, finding that out is the thing that's going to move you forward. And so it is actually part of this process. So the goal is, what can you do? If you are able to throw it away, throw it away. If you know that your local thrift store wants clean, but stained clothing, which these things are stained, but they're clean because they did run through the washing machine. If they want that, because they sell them for rags, if you already know that, then donate it to somebody who wants stained clothing, because a lot of places do, but not all. Then do the thing that you can do. What do you need to do to move forward? Because this frustration is keeping you from doing laundry. And that's the thing that can't happen if you want your house to be under control. Okay? Really quick plug for How to Manage Your Home Without Losing Your Mind. That was the first book that I wrote, and it's the guide for the completely overwhelmed in your home. And people who are completely overwhelmed in your home, the way that I was when I started this back in 2009, generally are overwhelmed with laundry. And that book, I teach you how to go from completely overwhelmed to now I know what it takes to manage my home without losing my mind. So it's available wherever books are sold. You can always go to aslobcomesclean.com/book, and that lists all my books. But if your library doesn't have it, request that they order it. And usually the person who requests it gets the first opportunity to check it out. Can't guarantee that, but you can ask. Okay, I hope this was helpful, and I will talk to you all next week. Bye.