It's not the kind of post I usually write, but you know, I've been a full blown adult for a while now, so why wouldn't I start ranting about some boring chores, huh? 😅
No, seriously, my laundry went from an exhausting and time consuming housework to something I just casually spend a few minutes a week on – and I'm so excited about that that I need to share.
Ironing
My first big laundry realisation was that… you don't have to iron your clothes. I know. Mind: blown 🤯
My ex mother would iron almost everything. She'd spend hours on it sometimes. I thought ironing is just a sad, inevitable fact of life. But then, on one of my first dates, the guy was talking about living on his own, and he mentioned that he just doesn't iron at all.
“Like, I didn't iron any of the clothes I'm wearing right now. Can you even tell?” – I couldn't.
Pretty much all of the modern washing machines have some anti-wrinkle techniques. Me and my husband used to own an iron and an ironing board at first, but we soon forgot they even existed. Boom, tons of time saved – by simply not doing a chore I used to think is necessary.
Drying
When we moved to a fully furnished apartment in Rotterdam, it was equipped with an electric dryer on top of the washing machine. Have heard of those, but never really used one.
Jesus Christ on a cracker, what a time saver it is! I've never seriously thought of those before. Cause why even spend hundreds of euros on a fancy machine, when you can just meticulously hang your wet clothes one by one on ropes, and then wait and wait, right? But since it's already there, let's try it out, right?
Trust me, it's worth the investment. If you can afford one, get one. (Just not a combined washer-dryer, those seem to be doing a meh job while being super power inefficient). Not only does it save you plenty of time, but also space (if you put it on top of your washing machine).
All you need to do is just put the wet things in, press some buttons, wait, and take them out. (And every once in a while empty the condensation container, I guess – but after moving again and getting a dryer of our own, we found out that you can just use a drain pipe instead of a container, so you don't even have to empty it.)
Sorting
This thing I wanted to do for a while now, but didn't have enough space until moving to a new place. Namely: get a laundry basket that is simply… split in parts. That's all. Simple as that.
Now I just have to pick the correct hole (blacks, colours, whites) whenever I put dirty piece of clothing in it. A fraction of a second of chosing for each item at the time, as opposed to going through a big pile of stinky stuff at once before each laundry. Marvellous!
Hanging
That one requires a bit more space in the closet, but speeds up the work massively. I used to neatly fold every top before putting it on a shelf. But then we started hanging them on hangers. Much faster, and prevents creases too.
That might be obvious for many, but it just wasn't a thing in my ex family, so I didn't even think for a second about any alternatives.
Summing up
I used to hate laundry.
Now I just undress, put the clothes in their proper basket, whenever one colour gets full, I put its contents in one machine, then another, and then hang it in the closet.
It seems so simple and obvious now, yet somehow it took me eight years so get there 😅