Laundry Routine

I’ve tried just about every laundry schedule or routine in the book.  Our needs are ever changing when it comes to doing laundry.   So, in another effort to do away with schedules in favor of routines, I am implementing a new laundry routine. 

Now that the children are a little older, I think it is time to start training them to do their own laundry.  D is already capable, and K just needs a bit more training before I set her off on her own.  J is just 8 and a boy.  I make excuses for him, but honestly the boy is quite capable of learning to use these machines.  He could probably repair them in a pinch. The sorting on the other hand…well he will need supervision for a long time. Let’s just leave it at that.

I have decided to implement a by room system for this season.  We have 4 bedrooms, 2 baths, and kitchen.  Kitchen rags need to be done more than once a week, so that will get worked into our routine every other day or so.   I’m thinking it will look something like this:

Day	Monday	Tuesday	Wednesday	Thursday	Friday	Sat/Sun
Room	Bath/ Kitchen/ Whites	Master Bed	D’s Bed/ Kitchen/ Whites	K’s Bed	J’s Bed/ Kitchen/ Whites	Sheets

We don’t wash our sheets every week.  I know, some people are cringing, but we just don’t.  About every other week is what I would like to maintain. I’m not trying to make any huge leaps in bounds here in establishing new routines, just trying to be more consistent in what we tend to already do. I will likely rotate rooms each week.  Week 1 and 3 will be Master and K; week 2 and 4 will be D and J. That would be one large bed and one small bed each week.

I tend to get 2 loads done a day, but not as regularly as I would like.  I feel like if we make it each person’s responsibility to wash their own clothes, with the exception of my husband, people may be a little more motivated to help.  A week's worth of clothes for one person should take about 2 loads. I think that is pretty reasonable amount of laundry once a week for a kid to do.  I’ll do the rest for the time being, but part of the girls training will be to do the household laundry eventually too.  

Like with kitchen rags, I will need to do whites a little more often. Don’t know if 3 times a week will be needed; we have a lot of those types of things, but we also have the occasional accident that needs to be dealt with sooner rather than later.  

The other part of the laundry routine is deciding when this will happen during the day.  I think the best plan is to hit it in the morning before school, at lunchtime, and before bed, but we can be flexible with that because this is a routine, not a schedule.   Once laundry line season starts, it might need to look a little different. To get the clothes dried before the sun goes behind the trees you have to get washing done before 10am.

Mondays will be hard because we are in co-op all day.  That is why I have only put towels on Monday.  I think I can get Hubs to switch them at lunch time for me if I am sweet about it and I don't use the clothes line for towels.  

One of my pitfalls is that I have these great plans and then I don’t communicate them, but once.  I have a fantasy that I should only have to tell someone to do things once.  

Since I don't have a chore chart picked yet I'm not completely sure how this will be communicated, but for now I'll just add it to their lesson plan for the day under Keepers of the Faith. 


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UPDATE 12/15/15

This routine worked for a little while.  Eventually, I handed off all laundry chores to D, now 16.  Her system is to do a couple loads a day if she remembers or is reminded.  This has slowed things down and increased the pile.  Also, she is not that motivated to bring clean clothes upstairs very often.  Maybe more training is in order.

I'm going to rethink things while we are on Christmas break and see if we can't get back to a steady system.

Decluttering

The biggest issue we have in this family, related to cleaning, is not putting away things when we are done with them.  This includes dishes, food, clothes, trash, games, books, DVDs, and a host of other personal belongs.  We can take a clean and orderly house and trash it in less than 24 hours.  No joke.

The best solution to this problem would be to train people to put things away when they are done, but would you believe that is harder than it sounds?  I just don’t think I have the time or the energy to do that for myself right now, let alone 3 kids and 1 husband.

One thing I do that helps this issues is to grab a laundry basket and go room to room, on one floor (we have 3) picking up personal belongings.  Once I’m done I call for deliveries to be made.  I either give the chore to one child or I will have them pick out their own belongings and take them away to their rooms. 

If I do this consistently every day, we have a much easier time of it.  It makes it easier to see what actually needs to be cleaned and makes it easier to clean.

I recently moved a toy chest/bench from my son’s room down to our living room near the entry.  It has helped with this issue.  That area is a catch all area anyway. It’s a main kid entry form coming in/going from playing and where the stairs lead up to the bedrooms. This has helped us have a place to tuck things out of sight which has helped us keep our common rooms more orderly.  YAY for order!

The second biggest issue we have is that we own too many things that we don’t need.  The last few months, since my mom’s death, I have been trying to purge our belongings of unnecessary things because we have so many of her things that we need to bring into the house.  She had a lot of really nice belongings, much nicer than most of the stuff we own, so we are upgrading I guess you could say. I have a pile on the front porch ready to go to Goodwill, but our front yard is too wet to pull the truck up or even to walk items out to the car. We could haul them through the house, but really…I’m too lazy. I’ll just wait for some dry ground.  Until then, call us the Sanfords.

Honestly, the purge has been good for us.  I have spoken to the kids many times about getting rid of things they don’t love to make room for the things from Grandma that they do. We’ve also talked about how my mom had so many things and it has really left us with quite a burden.  I’ll post on that sometime soon.  We discuss how material possession can’t go with you.  You don’t store material treasure for yourself in Heaven.  Your treasure in heaven is righteousness.  Better to build relationships and share the Gospel than to spend your time maintaining your personal belongings. 

I know I am going to look back on this post in a couple of years and wonder how I could have even written those words right now. I’m certainly putting far more time into maintaining possessions than I should; and since I know God is doing a work in me right now, I am certain he will have brought me a long way in 2 years.  Something to look forward to.  But for now, we’re in training.

The two best tips I can think of in the area of declutter are:

Lazy Girl Tip #1: Purge things you don’t use and don’t love. You can’t take them with you.
Lazy Girl Tip #2: Declutter every day, even if it’s just one room.

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Dishwashing Routine

Like in other areas of my life right now, I’m tossing out schedules and replacing them with routines, so it seems timely to finally update my post about our dishwashing schedule. After we bought our dishwashers and for about a year after, our system of getting the dishes washed was a basic rotation of the job.  One washes, the other unloads the dishwasher, and the third had the day off.  This switched every day. Every time I got off of the posted schedule for whatever reason, I would hear MAJOR complaints. 

“I did it last time.”

“It’s her turn.”

“Why doesn’t he ever have to wash?”

“Blah, blah blah!”

The kids were obviously becoming too legalistic about the schedule and it wasn’t accomplishing what I had hoped it would so…I tore it up in a fit of rage!

Lazy Girl Tip #1: Don’t keep doing things that don’t work just for the sake of doing them.

Lazy Girl Tip #2: Don't have fits of rage.

For the last few months I have been just choosing who would do the task.  In my head I try to keep it fair and rotate through equally, but honestly, I don’t like this system.  It leaves it to me to micromanage them, always telling them when to do the chore, and they still complain if they think I'm not keeping it fair.  It doesn’t build any ownership, a sense of responsibility, or teamwork.  It's just the chore that everyone hopes they don’t get stuck with.

I’ve been looking for a good chore system for our family for some time now.  I haven’t found one that I’m ready to settle down with. Until I find one, I've started a new routine that I hope will help maintain peace and an orderly kitchen.  It’s so simple, it’s stupid.

Lazy Girl Tip: Keep it simply, stupid.

I have someone, sometimes me, unload the dishwasher in the morning and start it before bed. Usually this means that we don’t have dishes to do in the morning, or if we do, very few.   I also call one dishwashing session during the day where we wash pans, plastic, and other things that we don’t put into the dishwasher. That's it.  Like I said: simple.

As a side note, the girls pointed out to me the other day that I will say, “do the dishes,” or ,“start the dishwasher,” and I mean different things.  When I say, “start the dishwasher,” I only mean load and start the dishwasher.  When I said, “do the dishes,” I mean all the dishes, pots, and pans, use the dishwasher, and wash by hand. HA! Who knew? There had been confusion about that for a while.  I don't really think it was all that confusing; I think they were just looking for excuse to avoid washing the pots and pans, but WHATEVER!

Lazy Girl Tip: Say what you mean.

So until I have found a chore system that I like and that works, this routine will have to do for now. 

1.       Load the dishwasher at night.

2.       Unload it in the morning.

3.       Call one hand washing session per day.

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