6 Smart Ways to Do Less Laundry

Make Some House Rules

The goal, says St. James, who also wrote Simplify Your Life with Kids: A Little Treasury, is to limit laundry to one load per family member per week, which would amount to a 41% reduction in household laundry for a family of four. “You don’t have to start humming ‘The Impossible Dream,’ at this point, either,” she says. Reducing laundry loads is simply a matter of reducing the mountains of sheets, towels, and clothes that otherwise rise toward the sky. This may require rethinking some personal aesthetics (such as compulsive sock changing), but the benefits far outweigh the inconveniences.

“The first rule you should establish is: one towel and one washcloth per person a week,” says St. James. If the towels become too damp to survive, they can be tossed into the dryer for a few minutes,” which is a lot easier than doing a whole load of wash. “And if you’re planning to reduce everyone’s use of towels, a good way to keep track is to assign a different color to each user in your family. That way, you’ll be able to keep tabs on offenders who swipe a towel across a clean face and dump it directly in the hamper. Sheets can probably be laundered every two weeks instead of every week, says St. James. It would also make things easier to buy white cotton sheets for every bed in the household. “That way, they can all be laundered together,” she says.

Buy Washable Clothes

My sister, Ann, has a wardrobe philosophy that helped her survive raising five children: “If I can’t throw it in the washer, it doesn’t belong in my house.” But many of us have a wardrobe filled with hand-washables that are shunted aside because they are too laborious to clean and too expensive to send out. The solution: Buy clothes with an eye toward managing the wash. Read care labels and avoid anything that requires special handling.

It’s possible to choose clothes that require less ironing if you know something about how fabric is constructed—whether it’s woven or knitted. Kathryn Hatch, a professor of textiles at the University of Arizona in Tucson, recommends buying cotton knits, sometimes blended with polyester, rather than cotton weaves. The yarns in the knits “slide by each other more readily, so the fabric doesn’t wrinkle easily,” she says. Since cotton woven fabrics are usually less stretchy, “they wrinkle to death in the dryer.”

Choose Colors Carefully

Dark colors tend to be the easiest to care for because minor spots don’t show. By contrast, light clothes are walking targets for stains and even a casual brush with dirt. By sticking with clothes that can be washed together—rather than clothes that have to be sorted into separate loads of bright colors, dark colors, and whites—you can further reduce the work.

Stay Out of Dirt’s Way

One sure way to lighten the load is to keep things clean in the first place—obviously not forever, but long enough to break the wear-once-and-wash cycle. Use aprons—tough ones that protect clothes from spots that would otherwise send them straight to the hamper. “Hang aprons in the garage, in the workshop, wherever you get messy—and wear them,” says Cheryl Mendelson, author of Home Comforts: The Art and Science of Keeping House.

A better protection against wash pileup is to wear designated clothes for grimy activities. Have play clothes for children to play in, and worn-out garments reserved for fabric-destroying jobs, like painting or working on the car.

Make Laundry a Family Activity

Stop thinking you’re the only one who can really do this chore well, and start seeing laundry as a team sport: You wear it; you help wash it. And if you think the kids aren’t up to the task, consider this revelation from St. James. “I don’t want this to be too much of a shock to hear,” she says, “but I know of a woman with a 10-year-old boy who has been doing his own laundry every week for two years. He washes, dries, folds, then puts away his own clothes.” In fact, kids are uniquely skilled to do laundry. They’ve spent time in preschool learning to sort blocks and shapes, master the color wheel, and play with toys that have knobs and buttons and make little beeps. In short, a primer for using the washer and dryer.

Have family members divide their clothes into those that can be worn again and those that need washing—and then put the latter immediately into a hamper. To help this along, each person needs a personal hamper so that dirty laundry has a ready destination. The hampers don’t have to be fancy: “a wicker or plastic basket, or even a paper bag will do,” says St. James. “Train everyone to put dirty clothes inside, and fold or hang up the things that can be worn again, such as jeans and outer shirts.”

Simplify Your Socks

Another way to cut down on laundry is to eliminate extra clothes where possible—beginning with the sock drawer. “I mean, why have different colors?” asks St. James, who advocates having just seven identical pairs to last the entire week. Put them all in a mesh bag to wash and dry them, then put the whole bag straight into a bureau drawer. “You’ll never have to fold them or hunt for the mates,” she says. “It saves a tremendous amount of time.”