How to Fold Laundry Efficiently

Involve your children with folding laundry to entertain them as you work.

Folding laundry is as mundane a task as it is useful. Without folding, laundry becomes wrinkled and difficult to organize and store. As time consuming as it is, laundry folding is considered a must-do chore in most households. Approach the job of laundry folding strategically to make it more efficient.

Instructions

1. Fold your laundry as soon as the dryer cycle finishes to reduce your ironing work load. Allowing laundry to cool in the dryer causes wrinkles. Set a timer for yourself if you cannot hear the dryer buzzer from other locations in the house.

2. Improve your efficiency by multitasking. Do something else while you fold laundry, such as making a long overdue phone call or watching a taped program on your DVR. Other things you can do while folding laundry include supervising your children's homework or watching a simmering sauce that needs to be stirred every few minutes.

3. Allow enough room to place folded laundry items into category piles. For example, pile folded dish cloths separately from dishtowels, so that when you put them away, you can put away piles instead of individual items.

4. Save time while folding socks by using some extra space to spread them out. As you pull a sock from the pile, rather than hunting for its mate, simply lay it out flat in the sock area. Grab the next item from the top of your clean pile and proceed with folding. When you get to the next sock, see if it matches the one laying flat, and if not, lay it out flat as well. Notice that scanning socks that are laid out flat next to each other is faster than hunting for pairs through a pile that contains other laundry.

5. Solve the issue of clothing emerging from the dryer inside-out by delegating the task of turning it right-side out to those who wear the clothing. Teach your children how to tell the difference between clothing that is inside-out and right-side out, and explain to them that they must ensure that their clothes are right-side out before they put them on. If they ask you to do this for them while you are folding laundry, explain that it takes time but you will, in exchange for their help with another household task that will save you time somewhere else.

6. Reassess whether or not underwear really needs to be folded. Items that small tend to get messed up in the drawer anyway, so save yourself some time by not folding them to begin with.

References

• Mama's Laudry Talk: How to Quickly Fold a Load of Clothes; July 7, 2010