Godwins law, right off the bat. 
So my partner did a load of laundry. Clothes. Including my work clothes. On hot, with towels mixed in, and then left in the dryer for god knows how long, with a dryer sheet.
Am I so wrong to be pissed?
Do you just object to the method, or was there actual damage (the clothes absorbing some color from the towels)?
My husband has “helped” me with the laundry a few times. He’s washed dry clean only items, and dried them on the highest setting. I finally had to forbid him from washing anything other than his own clothes, and the sheets, and the towels. So no, I don’t think you are wrong to be pissed. Any person who is old enough to be a partner is old enough to read the frigging care instructions, and to know how to do general laundry.
It’s not a matter (usually) of the clothing getting some dye from the towels. Towels are very abrasive, and should only be washed by themselves or with a plastic shower curtain.
What problems could this cause?
What problems could what cause? In the case of washing and drying towels with other laundry, it can cause pills or excessive wear on the other laundry. Washing and drying fabric on a setting that’s too hot can cause the fabric to shrink, or the dye to run, or the fabric to “felt”. I used to have a lovely pashimina (shawl) that was just the right weight for most fall and spring evenings. It was soft and fluffy and wonderful to wear. My husband washed and dried it on a high setting, and that poor shawl shrunk to about half its size, and it resembled cardboard in texture. It couldn’t be restored. That pashimina became a $75 cat blanket, and my husband was in the doghouse for a while.
I think I’d be in the doghouse too if something like this came up. I tend to just toss everything I’ve got in the hamper into the washer. So far it’s worked but I guess I don’t have anything delicate enough to be harmed by it.
No. You have every right to kill him at the earliest opportunity.
And don’t get me started about when MY partner tries to do the dishes. No court in the land would convict me I reckon.
I learned very early on that only clothes that withstand the abuse of hot water and hot dryers go in the laundry hamper. As a result there is an impressive pile of special care items in a heap at the bottom of my closet :-/
My husband doesn’t do laundry unless asked…and I never ask. That said, I didn’t know about towels making things pill up but that makes sense. They do shed more lint than other fabric.
My dad taught me years ago that anything that can be washed on warm or hot can be washed on cold to no harm. Along similar lines, I wash most things on the “Low Heat” setting since it still seems to get them dry, and a few things I own can be damaged by high heat drying cycles (such as the PT Uniform the Air Force has, with all the reflective decals all over it.).
The only things I dry on high heat are blue jeans (which always have a few spots that refuse to dry on low heat and end up feeling cold and clammy if I put them on straight out of the dryer) and towels. The towels I figure don’t NEED to be kept in perfect condition anyways, and if I manage to somehow ruin one in the laundry, I’ll just drop a fiver on a new towel.
But yeah, laundry and dishes and cooking are three areas that parents really should touch on with their kids before letting them loose on the world. The only one of these things that I ever have any concern for with my room mates is my cookware. I made a point to let them know not to put the nonsticks on high heat or to use metal utensils with them, and told them that you can’t leave a cast iron pan wet (I did it once, figuring it would air dry, and I ended up with rust spots I had to clean off before reconditioning it)
Towels won’t make every fabric pill, but if a fabric has a tendency to pill, washing and drying it with a towel, or even a single washcloth, will bring out that tendency.
Towels, washcloths, any made of terrycloth should only be laundered with other terrycloth items. I try to buy all of these things in white or at least very pale pastels so they can be washed in one load. My husband loves to buy towels in deep dramatic colors, and then he uses chlorine bleach on them. He has some rather odd ideas about laundry. Anyway, I wash white and pastel towels and such with hot water and a warm rinse, especially if someone in the household has the creeping crud, or some sort of infection. And I use chlorine bleach. They get dried on high heat, because otherwise they won’t get dry.
I wash sheets and pillowcases together, generally on warm/warm, unless someone has the creeping crud. Generally, I don’t use bleach unless someone has CC. I dry on moderate to high heat. Well, my daughter brought home head lice once, and then everything got washed and dried on hot. AND I washed the pillows, too.
I try to launder blue jeans together, along with any sturdy denim articles. Sometimes cotton pants are made of pretty sturdy material and can be washed in a blue jean load. However, some denims are more fragile than others. I have several denim dresses that need to be washed and dried as if they were polyester, that is, they need cold or tepid wash and rinse water, and a low dryer, or else they tend to wrinkle up like a prune, and their buttons go all to pieces. I try to avoid buying garments from that manufacturer now.
Other than that, I separate the laundry by color and weight, and I generally wash everything other than terrycloth, sheets, and jeans on warm or cold, and I dry everything else on permapress cycle. If the water or dryer temp is too high, sometimes it will cause permanent damage to clothes, and if any stains are present, they can be permanently set by high temps. On the other hand, the worst that will happen if you wash a washable item on cold is that a stain might not come out the first time. So use cold to wash if you can.
I don’t separate out any of my laundry, including my work clothes, towels, and my husband’s heavy cargo pants. Everything on warm, with HE Tide. A few things I pull out before drying. It strikes me as slightly insane to believe that dire catastrophe will result, because I assure you it does not.
shrug
Then again I only buy clothes that can be machine washed. If it can’t be chucked in with everything, it goes to the dry cleaner. If I can’t afford to bring it to the dry cleaner, and it requires fussy washing, I don’t buy it in the first place.
I love my husband and my cleaner, but neither of them seem to have the same ideas about laundry as me.
My husband ruined a very expensive silk blouse, and the cleaner felted and shrank a mohair throw that had belonged to my grandmother.
After trial and error I have discovered that the best system is to do the delicate and wool washes myself and make sure the only things in the hamper on the day the cleaner comes can be washed at 40degrees, because her goal seems to be to empty the hamper in as few runs of the machine as possible. She knows the only things I like to be run through the dryer are irishbaby’s clothes (for softness). Everything else I like to line dry, so thank goodness we haven’t had dryer disasters as well.
You all sound like my wife, when I decided to be helpful and wash a load of her sweaters.
I prefer to reserve the term ‘Nazi’ for actual members or admirers of the National Socialist Party. How about ‘strict prescriptivist’?
Absolutely! I am the only one allowed to do laundry in my house. I hate that fact but no one else can be trusted. My mother-in-law is the worst offender. We have a collection of ‘dog towels’, all of which came from her house. They are formerly bright blue and pink towels that are faded, pilled all to rat-shit and have bleach stains on them because she cannot get it through her head that it’s a bad idea to measure a cup of bleach and throw it directly on the clothes while the washing machine is filling up. She’s also one of those people who says things like ‘That pink blouse is too light to run.’, only to discover that when it’s washed on hot (instead of hand washed) with a load of white things, it will indeed leave little pink splotches on whatever it was up against as it spun.
Please understand - if anyone throws in a pair of $20 denims with a load of my good dress shirts, I don’t care if he repays me $250. for every shirt he ruined - I will still refer to him publicly, at every opportunity, as a god-damned shithead who can’t be arsed to follow the fucking simplest of fucking instructions!
Honestly!
You’re not wrong. Doing laundry incorrectly has likely been the cause for demise of many relationships. 
I used have a neighbor in an apartment building with a shared laundry room for every four apartments. If I had clothing in the washer when hers came out of the dryer and there was leftover dryer time, she’d throw my clothes in “just to be nice.”:smack:
I finally had to tell her that if she threw one more load of my sweaters in her (hot) dryer, I’d sue her for destruction of property. She just didn’t get that they needed to be air dried and some of them blocked.
My late SO never really learned to do laundry and tended to just dump everything in together. A ruined silk blouse was the closest I ever came to slapping him.
Can you explain this a little more? I wash $20 denims with my dress shirts all the time, and nothing bad happens. In fact I am doing it right now. My dress shirts are cotton Oxford shirts. Admittedly, they did not cost $250.
I’ve been doing my own laundry since i was 11 years old (6 years of boarding school).
My wife and i generally each do our own laundry. This is not because we have a “you do yours, i’ll do mine” philosophy of housework, but because we often end up on different laundry “schedules.” We don’t have regular 9-5 jobs, and we work from home some days during the week. This semester, for example, i have to be on campus MTW, and my wife’s teaching schedule is MWF. Each of us will often do laundry on one of our days at home, and we tend to do our own stuff, especially when it comes to things that require some extra care.
I like to wash my dress shirts and hang them up rather than put them in the dryer. My wife likes to put some of her smaller things in mesh bags. It’s just easier, for those things, to do our own.
That doesn’t mean that we never share a load of laundry. I will often say things like, “I’m about to do a load of gym clothes and t-shirts. Do you have anything you want to put in?” and she will then give me a handful of stuff that can go in with my clothes. Or she will say, “I’m doing a load of jeans. Do have have any that need washing?”
It all works out pretty well.
Yes, happily - if there is one fabric where I don’t trust the dye not to run, it’s denim. Even if it doesn’t dye the entire load a pale shade of grey/blue, it can run against something that it rests against in the spin cycle. Also, the denim material is rougher, thicker and stronger, which can cause pills on the softer, gentler fabric of the dress shirt.
I wish you continued good luck with your laundry - in my experience, denims in a light coloured load is a big no-no.
I have several pair of formerly white underwear which were dyed grey/blue from wearing a new-ish pair of jeans on a hot day in the summer.
My dress shirts are collected in a separate pile, washed on a delicate cycle ‘cold/cold’ (unless there is a specific stain to remove) and are then hung to dry to avoid shrinking, then ironed the next day while still barely damp.
Note to self: don’t let Raguleader shrink my jeans.
Jeans are air-dry items in this house.