Conquering Your Laundry Everest
Written by Brianna Hosack - Published February 2, 2025
Originally posted February 12, 2021 on The Minimalist Toddler Mama Blog. By Brianna Hosack
Conquering Your Laundry Everest
If you have never thought of your laundry pile as a mountain, you probably won’t understand the metaphor, or be interested in this post at all.
However, if you quite literally need to stretch, and mentally prepare yourself before walking into the laundry room to climb your family’s mountain of filthy cast offs… you are in the right place.
The steps you need to take if you want to climb Mount Everest, according to a quick google search:
Climbing conditioning - pack-loading uphill hiking, walking, and stair climbing
Strength training - for the lower body and core
Cardiovascular training - including both aerobic and anaerobic workouts with and without pack weight
Flexibility training
This, assuming you are in good health and injury-free to begin, and STILL most people will need to train for at least a year AFTER a solid baseline of fitness…
I 100% identify preparing to climb Mount Everest with learning to master the laundry routine, if it’s as hard for you as it was for me!
Photo by Martin Jernberg on Unsplash
If you are anything like me when I started out:
You forget loads regularly in the washing machine.
I just reminded you to go switch it, didn’t I? Go ahead, we’ll wait…
…Good? Ok.
You:
Have had to rewash loads because they smell faintly like mildew… sometimes several times.
Have had to throw items out, in real life, because of mildew stains and a smell that won’t go away, all because of your lack of focus or motivation.
Snooze reminders that YOU SET on your phone to switch the load, until you are so annoyed you hit stop instead of snooze, and promptly forget about switching the load for the next 3 days until someone needs clean underwear.
And so on…
You almost NEVER empty the dryer before everything is thoroughly wrinkled. As in, they could have been ironed into that position. Even your towels and comforters are wrinkled.
Because of this, your partner and EVEN YOUR KIDS toss clean laundry back in the dirty laundry hamper (ok let’s be honest, onto the floor - all the hampers are full of wrinkled, clean laundry, waiting to be folded!).
This, to wash out the wrinkles (hahaha, seriously haven’t they ever heard that doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results is the definition of insanity??
…Then again, you’re the one who keeps hoping all the laundry will disappear, even though you’re not DOING it!).
This rewashing pattern, of course, only exacerbates the issue.
No-one ever really has the laundry items they are looking for when they want them, and your laundry mountain NEVER seems to shrink, no matter how hard you try.
Or, you know… how hard you dread, and therefore avoid it.
You don’t see the point of emptying it right away, since it will still sit in the clean hampers getting wrinkled even if you pull it out of the dryer as soon as it’s done.
You don’t see the point of folding laundry. I mean, we all know it keeps things wrinkle-free…ish.
But as soon as people start digging through the unsorted, folded clothing, (which is still living in the hamper, just on their bedroom floors now) it all comes unfolded and wrinkles itself anyway!
You are pretty sure every person you have ever heard say that they ‘fold laundry as they pull it out of the dryer’ is either:
Single, has no kids, has no pets, is crazy, is rich and doesn’t have to take the time to work, or has a reallllly fancy dryer that they don’t have to bend in half to reach into to pull out each item.
Maybe all of the above!
You dread putting away clean, folded, sorted laundry, even though you know it’s nonsensical to dread it. I know, because it doesn’t really make sense to me either.
It might be about the mess the kids will make during the 5 hours you’ll have to spend wading through the mess, putting things away, RE-folding them, (because of COURSE they aren’t folded anymore) trying to figure out what clothes will fit best where…
Because somehow all the drawers are full despite the mountain still growing in the basement.
And you hate, hate, HATE hanging things on hangers. Everything just falls back OFF when you try to shove it in the closet and onto the bar!
You’re sure the pile on the floor of the closet is clean. It definitely isn’t worth adding it to the dreaded mountain… until it’s been months since you saw that cute yellow dress and you finally find it at the bottom, growing its own dust bunnies, amongst what could well be a nest composed entirely of dog hair…
And yet… you ‘never have anything to wear’.
You spend what seems like HOURS every week helping your kids or husband find items they are looking for, and trying to decide what to wear.
You get defensive if your husband says he will ‘just wash a load’ because of course, you’ve got this, and he will screw up your system. You’re sure he’s got enough clean laundry, and you were PLANNING on doing a load ‘right away’ - how impatient could he be?!
I HAVE FELT YOUR PAIN, CLEARLY.
And I’m here, writing this post, because I know how truly overwhelming, depressing and stressful it can be. I know the endless struggle.
I grappled with and won through it. I slowly tried a TON of different things to find my groove.
I want to help other parents to get through it MUCH less painfully than I did!
This is NOT my story anymore.
Meaning: I broke free of ALL of that.
Now; I sometimes have days where there is no laundry to do - or not enough for a load anyway. (We all know that laundry is never ACTUALLY done, since we wear clothing and sleep on sheets and dry our hands on towels…)
Now; I occasionally pre-emptively wash something when I know a heavy laundry day is coming up. I routinely wash things that don’t HAVE to be done desperately, SO that it doesn’t ever get desperate. I know this sounds counterintuitive, but it’s true, and it actually helps.
Now; when hubs suddenly needs an item washed at the last minute before heading out of town, I frequently have to FIND something to fill the load.
And not only is the washing machine empty…the dryer is empty. There is an empty hamper waiting, and I don’t have a backlog of laundry to fold or put away. He knows where the item he needs is.
Oh. And it’s not (usually) wrinkly!
Photo by KINN Living on Unsplash
My life & our ‘stuff’ has been simplified, and LAUNDRY is a really great example of a way that minimalism has changed everything, ESPECIALLY now that I have kids.
Before, one weeks’ worth of laundry would never have fit on one couch.
Before, it not only would have been EASY to leave it out, but it would have been almost guaranteed that I didn’t put any of it away.
If you had asked me even just a few years ago if I would ever be a person that always had a clear couch, I’d have given you a HUGE guffaw, a hard no, or asked ‘do people really do that???’.
Before, we would have been struggling to find clothes to wear every day from the ‘laundry couch’.
So… what are the steps you need to ‘get in shape’ and ‘climb your laundry mountain’?
How did I get to the point where this was easy, and manageable for me?
Come back to the blog and keep reading to find out!
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