Nothing to See Here…

I hate laundry. Hate it. If you said “Linda, what household chore do you hate the most?” there would be no hesitation before I said laundry.

In fact, often when faced with absolutely nothing to wear because it’s all dirty, I choose to go SHOPPING rather than do laundry. And yes, I’ve even gone out to buy new underwear for lack of having any clean ones. The irony of this, of course, is that buying new clothing leads to having MORE laundry.

In fact, I know that we collectively own too many items of clothing for no other reason than my laundry laziness. If, by some miracle, I were to completely catch up on laundry, we would be in BIG BIG trouble because we would lack sufficient storage space for all the clean stuff. But that will never happen. The last time I was completely caught up on laundry was in 1985, I think.

I have an entire hamper of mismatched socks. AN ENTIRE HAMPER. It’s not like I feel any sentimental connection to these socks. I have no plan for a huge family sock-puppet-show. It’s just that there are days when I dip into it for a mismatched pair for my daughter because that is much better than sending her to preschool sockless and for heaven’s sake she’s wearing jeans so it’s not like you can see and dammit when is summer going to come again so we can all wear sandals with no socks.

I have piles of laundry, MOUNDS of laundry. Some days, I’ll want to glance outside and see the sun but alas I cannot because of the laundry. There is laundry in my room. There is laundry in the kids room. There is the chair by my bed piled with laundry. There is the laundry that is stored on the exercise equipment (dry clean only, please). Then there is the laundry room itself, which is really more like a huge closet with some appliances in it. And yes, that’s covered in dirty laundry too.

I’ve been toying with a whole new radical approach to laundry. I thought I’d run it past all you guys first and see what you think.

The traditional model is this: keep your dirty clothes CLEAN so they are ready to wear! Now, it’s not possible to have 100% of it clean all the time, so there will always be that one dirty load. Do that load every night and keep up on the problem of laundry!

In this scenario, closets and dressers and chests are required. And hangers– hundreds of hangers. And there is the whole matter of logistics - moving it from the laundry room into the dressers and closets and chests. This is obviously the model that most people choose and the one that I am incapable of supporting.

What if we turn this model on its head (hey, Russ - am I thinking outside of the box or what??). What if I keep ALL of the laundry DIRTY. Yeah. And then I do the one load to get us stuff to wear TOMORROW. I call this JITL (Just In Time Laundry). For those of you in business, the JIT concept isn’t new at all (just in time inventory, just in time manufacturing, etc.)

Here are the advantages of this plan:

1. No hanging stuff up, folding it, putting it in drawers, etc. It all gets shoved in hampers! I wash tonight what we shall wear tomorrow. I can sell this excess furniture on eBay and store all the damn toys in the empty closets.
2. Because it is necessary to do that load in order to have clean clothing tomorrow, there is a motivational imperative (a clean closet full of stuff does NOT motivate me to do a load).
3. Fewer ensembles of clothing are required per person because we’re washing the stuff “just in time”. I mean, theoretically, a person could get buy with ONE pair of underwear in this model (well, we wouldn’t cut back THAT drastically, but you get the idea). Less money spent on clothes might mean, what, a PONY for the kids? A 400-CD-Changer for the husband? A date with Orlando Bloom for Linda? Who knows!
4. For the times I fuck up and DON’T do the necessary nightly load, I get to call in sick the next day!!!

I am not even kidding on this. Tell me how this isn’t a grand scheme. Tell me why this won’t work.

If you talk to my eldest daughters, they will tell you mean and untrue stories about how I made them start doing their own laundry as toddlers. That may be a bit of an exaggeration. Amber tells people she remembers having to climb up on top of the washer in order to move her stuff to the dryer because she was too little to stand on the floor and reach in and get it. I think she’s a LIAR and I can only wonder about the quality of the people who raised her!

Actually, it’s probably true. They were about 10 and 12 when I started noticing something — stuff I had JUST washed rejected onto the floor and then reentering the never-ending dirty laundry stream. They were at that age where they would try on an outfit and then reject it for something else. But did they hang it up? Noooo… they must have assumed I *loved* doing that stuff since I spent so much time doing it.

I cut them off like Betty Ford did Robert Downey Jr. NO MORE! If they weren’t going to cooperate, I wasn’t doing their laundry. And so the task was passed from me. Ahhh… relief.

But dammit if I didn’t go breed THREE MORE kids! What the hell. And the nine year old is now starting this habit of changing three times per day and discarding perfectly clean clothes into the laundry basket. So she’s about to get a lesson in using the washer and dryer.

And maybe, if she’s lucky, a stepping stool.