Laundry Tips: 1 Simple Trick Will Save You Loads & Time

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I envy people who have a designated laundry day.

With a rough-and-tumble 8-year-old boy, two pets and a pair of messy adults, every day is laundry day around here.

I wish I could magically make my piles of dirty laundry, and yours, disappear. While I haven’t figured out how to do that Bewitched nose twitch thing to poof chores away, I did make one simple change to our family’s laundry routine that saves me loads of time and loads of laundry.

Can you guess what it is?

I swapped out all our bath towels (except for a few decorative ones) for hotel-quality white ones. I also got all-new dishcloths and drying towels for the kitchen.

If it’s a towel in our house, it’s white.

One simple switch, and I save all kinds of time sorting laundry, washing it and putting it away. I do fewer and fuller loads because I’m able to mix in other whites with the towels. Because I bleach the towels and run them in hot water on a heavy-duty cycle every time I wash them, they smell fresher and cleaner than our old colorful towels did. (I did mention those mess-making pets of ours, right? Enough said.)

Rather than wasting time sorting in the laundry room, I keep a pair of hampers for colors and whites.

Dirty clothes and towels go in the designated hamper — whites in one, colors in another — then straight into the washing machine. No additional sorting required.

When it’s time to put the towels away, I don’t have to worry about which ones go where. Every bathroom gets the same allotment of clean white towels, so I just add them to our individual laundry baskets.

As I mentioned before, I always wash our white towels and clothes in hot water, using bleach, so they stay crisp and fresh.

We don’t have many white clothes — mainly socks, T-shirts and unmentionables — so mustering a full load of those can take a while.

Before I made the switch to white towels, I often found myself washing small loads of whites. Now, I just toss them in with the towels, saving myself work and more than an hour of washer and dryer time.

With liquid bleach, I’m always scared that I’ll spill on myself or on the clean clothes underneath the laundry pedestal where our washer and dryer sit.

So I’m a big fan of the new Clorox® Bleach Crystals™ and Clorox® Bleach Packs™ that activate when mixed with water. No more fear of spills or splashing or ruining your clothes.

Just measure out some of the crystals or toss one of the Clorox® Bleach Packs™ into the drum of the washer.

We have a front-load washer, so I usually have to pour bleach into the dispenser. One of the (many) things I miss about having a top loader is the ability to let whites soak in bleach before the wash cycle.

With these new Clorox® products, I don’t have to use the dispenser, so our whites get the benefit of a longer soak in bleach.

You’ll find them in the laundry section at Walmart, along with other Clorox® Bleach products.

Overwhelmed by piles of dirty clothes? Here are more helpful laundry tips to make America’s least favorite chore a little bit easier. Plus check out these additional laundry tips from some other bloggers.

Do you have any laundry tips or secrets you’d like to share?