Lockdown Laundry Tips: Prioritize and Organize
LAUNDRY TIPS
If isolation is starting to get to you, you’re in good company; a lot of people are starting to feel the pressures that come with staying indoors and avoiding most other people. You may be feeling lonely, disconnected, or even just desperately bored.
A project may give you some purpose and distract you from your worries about illness and your feelings of isolation. Organizing your closet and dresser and determining what laundry takes priority right now is one possible project that you could take on. Take a look at some tips for organizing and prioritizing your clothes and laundry.
Empty Your Closets and Dresser Drawers
If you have multiple closets full of clothes and linens and multiple dressers, you may want to do this one closet or dresser at a time, not all at once. It’s tough to organize a closet or dresser drawer that’s full of clothes, so start with a clean slate by emptying the space in which you’re working.
Don’t worry, that won’t make as big of a mess as you think. As soon as your closet or dresser is empty, you can start grouping the items that you removed by category. Put jeans in one pile, T-shirts in another. Separate button-down shirts from polo shirts. Make separate piles for skirts, dresses, suits, sweaters, and so on.
Move Items Sensibly
The goal here is not necessarily to just put everything back where it was more neatly. You want to move items to other locations if it makes sense to do so. For example, if you have a bunch of bulky sweaters in a drawer, try hanging them up instead. They’ll stay in better shape that way and will leave more room for easily foldable items.
Other items, like T-shirts, might be better off in a dresser than on a hanger. These are easy to fold and don’t need to take up a lot of space, so you can fit a lot of them into a drawer instead of having them in the way of your must-hang items in the closet.
Sort by Use
It can also help to separate items by how you’re going to use them, especially in the closet. For example, hang all of your work clothes together; then hang all of your date-night clothes in a different spot. Put all of your undergarments in one drawer and your casual, around-the-house clothes in another. This way, you’ll always know what section of the closet to go to or what drawer to open based on the event for which you’re getting dressed.
Keep the season in mind, too. With spring here and summer on the way, you might move all of your winter clothes to the back of the closet or to a harder-to-reach drawer. This keeps them out of the way when you’re looking for weather-appropriate clothes, and you can always rotate to the front when the seasons change.