We’ve been talking a bit about saving space in the closet with different folding techniques. Today I want to save you a little time on laundry day with the simplest idea ever.
Lingerie bags.
We have over a dozen lingerie bags, some small, some large, and I rarely use them for lingerie.
Seriously, lingerie bags are about to be your new BFF (best friend forever), at least on laundry day.
Do you have one of those sock monsters haunting your washer/dryer like every other household in America? Why waste space in the laundry room with a basket for mismatched socks, or a clothes pin board to find a sock mates, when you could eradicate the sock monster entirely?
Here’s how it works: I provide a lingerie bag along with a hamper basket for my girls. When they take off their dirty socks, they (supposedly, we are still working on this part) straighten out the socks. Then they put them in the lingerie bag instead of the dirty-clothes basket. On their laundry day, they zip the bag and throw it in the dirty-clothes basket and put the whole load in the washer together (we sort by person, not color in our house). After washing, the whole bag moves over into the dryer, and once dry, all the socks are still there together. It’s a beautiful thing!
Another great use for lingerie bags? Sweaters.
Or any items that should not be moved to the dryer. Yes, you can use a dry-erase marker to leave yourself a note to pull out specific items that shouldn’t dry, but what happens when the marker rolls under the washer? Do you really have time to track down another one or challenge the brown-recluse you imagine lives under there to get it back? If you have the “hang to dry” items in a lingerie bag, they are quick and easy to identify in any load. The only extra step required, other than putting the item in the bag in the first place, is to look to see if the lingerie bag is full of socks or not. You can even have a stated policy that nothing in a lingerie bag goes into the dryer, for the days when the shoemakers elves are bored and show up to switch your laundry when you aren’t looking. Worst case? A bag of socks has to dry alone. Best case? No more shrunken sweaters. 🙂
And last, but not least…
Lingerie bags are great for stuffed toys and other plush items kids occasionally need washed. Again, they are easy to identify so you can pull them out to air dry. I know, most plush toys say “surface clean only,” but, really, if your child has just saturated the thing with some bodily fluid or other, are you really going to just dab at the surface? We haven’t sent any collectors items through the wash, but they aren’t usually the items around when accidents happen, and all manner of other plush toys have made it through the floodwaters without harm. At least they are clean enough to keep, right?