I find these two comments just a bit disturbing. Having seen your photo, 'Toons, I just can’t reconcile all of this. If I wake up screaming tonight, let it be on your head!
Remove clothes, throw in hamper, couple of days later clean clothes reappear in closet and dresser. Even though I am quite capable of doing laundry, my wife does not let me near the washing machine.
:: eyes own post above ::
Dear Lord. I’ve turned into a fussy old maid in britches, haven’t I?
But at least they’re clean britches, masonite!
Sort into piles: whites, lights, darks. If I have BIG piles, then I further sort into brights and jeans. I prefer to wash jeans separately, if at all possible. I also prefer to do one load of sheets, and another load of towels. We have enough of both to make this practical.
Glower at daughter who bought some “special care” clothes and tell her that she can “specially care” for them herself.
Set washer water level at the lowest setting, at the temp I feel is appropriate for my intended pile of laundry. Add detergent (and bleach, if it’s whites). Remove cat(s) from intended pile of laundry, pointing out that there are at LEAST two other piles to sleep on. Collect glare from cat(s). Wait for agitation (in washer, not from cats). Put laundry in washer, turn water setting higher if appropriate. When washer is done, call husband or daughter to remove it (I cannot manage it myself, due to being too short and stiff). Supervise transfer to dryer, making sure that everything is dried at an appropriate temperature. Start new load (including transferral of cat(s)). Fold MY dried laundry, allowing cat(s) to sniff it, and infuse it with more cat hair, if needed. Husband and daughter are perfectly capable of folding/hanging their own laundry when they watch TV.
I in no way accept responsibility for this. It won’t be on MY head, I haven’t slept with my bras strapped to my head since that ugly incident in Boston. Suffice to say, hooks are there for a reason !! :eek:
Lynn, I feel your pain. We have four cats. For reasons known only to felines, the pile you JUST washed and dried is the only acceptable pile in my house. If I dry on the drier, and fold and place into the baskets for dissemination to various owners, then that is the New Most Favorite Pile In The Universe At That Moment. Yes, it’s warm. SO? Darned creatures. They sleep in the basket with the darks or blacks, if it’s the mostly white cat. Of course, the mostly black furred cat sleeps in the whites.
And people say they’re not highly intelligent. They have brains the size of a cashew nut, and yet understand the concept of irony. Please… 
Much better than the first time I did laundry when I went away to college. Mom had given me a brief description of coloreds/whites (I have no delicates, thank you), and the dangers of washing them together. (This was a long time ago, so men often didn’t know anything about washing)
So, when I finally had no clean clothes, I went down to the dorm laundry room, and (standing there in my one remaining pair of white briefs) proceed to sort the clothes and wash them. Amongst the items was an ancient sweatshirt that had faded from dark red to light red…there’s a clue in that fading, folks…but I figured it wasn’t very colored, so in with the whites it went.
I do not recommend having pink underwear as a way to meet new people in dorms. By the third week of the semester, everyone knew my name…including those from the girl’s dorm. And there were several serious offers to help me do my laundry, so I actually did clean up from this experience.
I believe that this experience has scarred me for life. I still refuse to believe that all laundry can be sorted into the three major groups. What do you do with a blue and striped shirt? It is so confusing…
First I turn on the washer. Then I add the detergent. Then, while it’s filling, I add the clothes. I wash everything in cold, unless I have some reason to use hot. I sort into two groups–whites, and everything else.
I simply do not have the time or the patience to wait for the water to fill up before I add clothes, and as others have pointed out, it’s frustrating to add clothes to a tub full of water.
I hate doing laundry so much that I almost want to vomit being near this thread.
Detergent first. Then clothes. Then the Downy ball.
My system:
start cycle (I only do one cycle, the longest regular one, and one water temp, warm. Or warm/cold depending on the machine)
put in detergent
put in clothes (of which there is exactly one type: dirty)
wait 40 minutes
put clothes in dryer (on regular heat)
turn on dryer
wait 60 minutes
fold clothes as I take them out of the dryer
Done.
I’ve never had any problems whatsoever doing my laundry.
Clothes first, then soap, then turn it on.
Warm/Cold for everybody, although I do sort into three categories: lights, darks, reds.
“Wifecat? I need a good shirt for tomorrow…Thanks!”
It is nice being married to a Central European woman…she gets nightmares about me wearing a wrinkled shirt. I had to physically stop her from ironing my underwear.
Down side is that she thinks I’m not capable of doing my own laundry, even though I have been doing it since I was 10. Makes me feel weird sometimes not being allowed within 3 feet of the washing machine.
-T
First rule of laundry: Always strive to do laundry as infrequently as possible. Preferably in a state of nakedness, since you have no more clean clothes to wear.
Once you have completed the above mentioned objective, proceed as follows:
clothing in
start the water
add the fresh smelling wisk powder detergent
shut the lid
Whatever you do, make sure you do not open the lid during the spin cycle as the momentum will pull you into a time warp and undo all your hard work up to this point.
Today, I did it. I had :
Whites
Blacks
Blues
Yellows
Reds
Grays
Towels
Sheets/Pillowcases
Jeans
NINE freakin’ loads. I am STILL at it. However, I am darned glad that I started this thread. I’ve begun using Oxyclean in every load. Dash it in there with the soap, just as the water begins filling in. Because I’m neurotic about the Oxyclean damaging the clothing if it remains particulate even slightly, I run warm water just for a few moments, dump the Oxyclean and liquid soap in, agitate it hard, by hand so that the Oxyclean dissolves, the either leave it go ( in the case of Colors ), or switch to cold ( in the case of darks ).
On other fronts, I very much fear that the tumbler mechanism in the dryer is about to die, it’s vibrating wayyyyyyy too much today. Damn…
Well, phooey! I was sitting here blissfully surfing the boards and I opened this thread. And I remembered I have a mess o’laundry that has to be done. Including sheets. And the throw rugs are getting rather ratty looking.
Thanks, 'Toons. I owe ya one.
So, live and learn. I got to the whites, which I traditionally will do last so that the last thing to go through the washing machine is hot water and bleach.
So, if hot water and bleach are good, it logically follows that hot water, bleach, AND Oxyclean are better, n’est pas? Non.
After I dump in the Oxyclean and pour in some bleach and soap, I think…hmmm… Oh Paranoid One, read the label. On the Oxyclean jar is this warning, " DO NOT MIX WITH CHLORINE BLEACH". Nice. I immediately close the lid, and shut down the machine. I turn the knob to the Rinse cycle, and the machine sucks all of the stuff out of the Agitating Tank.
I went with just hot water and bleach, I’ll keep the Oxyclean for the rest of the stuff from now on, though.
FCM? Kwitcherbitchin’ and get foldin’.
I recently changed from a front loader, as is common in the UK, to an American top loader. The two instruction books which came with the machine both disagree with each other regarding the order in which detergent and clothes should be added… typical :rolleyes:.
Having tried it both ways, I find that sprinkling detergent on top of the load results in everything coming out smeared with white clumps of powder. Now I add the detergent first, then the clothes, and finally set the controls and start the machine. Seems to work much better that way, and everything comes out clean and well rinsed.
By the way, what on earth is a warm rinse used for? My new machine has this option, which isn’t something our native machines offer. Right now I’m using cold rinses for everything, but if there’s any particular reason to use warm, please fill me in!
front loader, front loader, front loader!!! saves on water and machine senses how much water to use. towels by themselves, the slacker load that can be folded later. gentle cycle for “good” clothing.
not to hijack-but a running battle in our house:is a towel “dirty” when you use it once? i say it is just damp, because you are clean (one would hope) when you use it, and can let it dry on the bar,but the OTHER says it is dirty because it is used…thoughts?
You’re really just not making laundry day difficult enough for yourselves. Me, my apartment’s small, doesn’t have a laundry hook-up and I don’t like to use the dryer (it wastes energy and is capricious about shrinking things). First I have to clear all the crap that’s collected on the top of my machine and then drag the little washer/dryer combo out of the closet, across the dining area and into the kitchen. I hook it up to the faucet and plug it in, then lock the wheels. Somewhere in this procedure I will cause a bruise, cut myself or break a nail. Next I load the washer with darks, then put a weensy scoop of unscented, earth-friendly, difficult to source, detergent into the drawer thingy. Softener, also unscented, earth friendly and difficult to find, is poured into it’s little drawer. Which drawer-- A or B? I dunno, I’ve only had this machine for three years. So I check the manual, chuckle over the Babbelfish-like translations, see that softener goes in drawer B. The machine gets to washing, I get to resenting it taking up nearly all the floor space in my miniscule kitchen.
A million hours later I take the clothes out and hang them up to dry on a folding clothes rack. It weighs a ton and is awkward to move around and assemble. If I haven’t hurt myself yet, this rack o’doom will get me. Repeat all of this a bunch of times until the entire apartment is festooned with drying clothes, sheets and towels so that it resembles nothing so much as a bazaar in some exotic country. For the next day or so I get to squeeze around the clothes, move them out of the shower so I can bathe, etc. In variably, once everything is tucked away, I discover something that needed washing. Sigh, I can’t even get upset about this laundry hell, 'cause I do it to myself. Still, I’d wash them in my tub before I put them in the complex’s laundry. The last time I used them, there was a smear of poo on the inside of the washer’s door. Ewwww.
I make my family use bath towels several times before washing them. Yes, you get out of the shower, dry clean water off your clean body and hang up the damp towel to use again a couple of times. Why make more work for yourself? It takes a lot of energy to dry those dang things.
When I went away to college many moons ago, my roommate (the Princess … but that’s another thread) arrived with enough bath towels to carpet a small country. She simply could not fathom the idea of using a bath towel, not even a face cloth, more than once without washing it. :rolleyes: