Five Ways To Better Laundry

By Lev Novak

Laundry can be a difficult beast to manage.

It takes up room in your hamper (or, let’s be real, floor) and slowly builds up. You hate doing it; you need the quarters, or to schlep that bag to a laundromat. You have to be around the machines and, overall, it’s time from your life dedicated to not being naked in public.

Understandably, we wait as long as we can to do laundry. Some of us employ a smell-test. The less gross of us just create outfits as needed. If you ever see me wearing a suit, be sure of one thing; I have absolutely no other clean shirts left.

So, how do you do it? How do you manage that dirty-clothed beast of laundry? Read on, dear reader, for your priority list.

1. Socks And Underwear

This is the obvious one; those are what you need clean and they take up the least amount of space. Always wash as many as possible. But there’s a trick here which you might not know.

If you really hate laundry, buy more of both.

See, shirts and pants can take multiple wearings. But underwear and socks cannot. That means you’re probably doing laundry when you run out of the socks and underwear; if you get more, though, your laundry rotation might go longer.

Let’s say you do laundry every ten days. If you get four more sets of both, you’ve stretched out your laundry-timing by forty percent (four of the ten, not the fifteen.) That’s a forty-percent gain in “not doing laundry” and the saved quarters will pay for those socks in no time. Meanwhile, keep in mind how nice a 40% reduction in laundry days will feel.

2. Extra Batch

Don’t try to fit everything into one batch.

Chances are you’re waiting to do your laundry until you absolutely have to. Personally, lots of things don’t fit into my actual washer, let alone the bonus watching items. That’s why, every now and then, I do an extra batch.

Throw in your sheets and pillow cases. Your towels, your pajamas you can use forever, the shirt on the floor that smells fine; everything you normally wouldn’t was should be washed. The day after you do your real laundry, and you finally don’t need anything washed, wash all the things that don’t normally make the cut.

Clean sheets is a baller move, too.

3. Don’t Wash Jeans

You can basically get away with never washing your jeans. Not washing them lets them last longer, and they take up a ton of room in your laundry bag. You got this.

4. Fold Your Clothes

Super annoying, super worth it. Fold your clothes in your drawer and watch as your room becomes a human-beings room, full of drawers and without clothes strewn everywhere.

Plus, you’ll find your clothes a whole lot easier. When your button-downs are hung up, you’ll look a lot better, too. It’s annoying, sure, but it’s worth it.

5. Check Your Pockets

Tissue fabrics in the washer and dryer makes all your clothes look really gnarly. Take it from me.

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