Laundry Week: The Real Problem Was Never the Laundry
Last week, I introduced you to the house. The real one. The one with a hole in the living room floor, a bedroom that moonlights as a laundry room, and a door that has been waiting seven years to be hung. If you missed that first post, the short version is this: I am 37, I have four kids, a dog, a husband, a 100-plus-year-old fixer-upper in Nebraska, and a deeply complicated relationship with Pinterest. You can check out the full post here
That post was the confession. This one is where we actually start doing something about it.
I promised you progress over perfection. I promised messy and honest. So here we are.
First project up: the laundry.
Except — here is the thing I did not see coming. The laundry was never really the problem.
The Laundry Mountain Nobody Talks About
Let me paint you a picture. Four kids. Two working parents. One dog who treats every clean pile of laundry like a personal bed. A hole in the living room floor that feeds directly into the basement. A bedroom with no real door that holds every single item of clothing our family owns — clean, dirty, somewhere in between, and honestly some things I cannot identify.
The laundry chute is a great concept in theory. You shove stuff through the hole, it disappears, problem solved. Except the problem is not the hole. The problem is the basement. Because once it falls down there, it has to be washed. And dried. And folded. And carried back up the stairs. And put away.
That last part? That is where our system has historically fallen completely apart.
We are not talking about a basket or two sitting around. We are talking about laundry that has taken on a life of its own. Clothes on the bedroom floor. Clothes on the chair. Clothes on the other chair. A pile on top of the dresser. A pile inside the doorway. A basket of clean stuff that has been “almost put away” for eleven days.
I thought the fix was a better system. A schedule. Maybe some matching bins with a nice label on them.
I was wrong.
The Actual Problem: We Have Too Much Stuff
Here is what I realized about halfway through Laundry Week, standing in a pile of clothes that somehow still had not gotten smaller despite three loads being done: the issue was not how we were doing laundry. The issue was how much we had to begin with.
Let me back up.
For over ten years, I worked in an office. Full corporate life — the suits, the blazers, the heels, the bags. Oh, the bags. Purses, backpacks, totes, structured handbags for every occasion. And the clothes — twenty dresses with matching suit jackets, twelve pairs of heels in various colors, blouses for every season. I had a whole wardrobe built around a life I was living every single day.
Here is the other thing: I was a size 0 from high school until around 2020. That is a long time. Long enough to accumulate a genuinely staggering amount of clothing that I never outgrew and never had a reason to get rid of.
Then 2020 happened. I got really sick — that is a whole other story for a whole other day — and everything changed. I left the office life four years ago and have not looked back for a single second. I work from home now. I am married. I have a toddler. What you see is what you get, and what you see is sweats. Comfortable, practical, glorious sweats.
I do not need the dresses anymore. I do not need the heels. I am also not a size 0 and, honestly, thank goodness for that — that version of me was held together with stress and structure and a schedule that left no room for anything soft. But the clothes were still here. All of them. Taking up space, creating laundry piles, making every single morning feel like a scavenger hunt through someone else’s closet.
And my kids? Same story, different scale. So many clothes. More than they need, more than they wear, more than I can keep track of. The overbuying in this house is real, and I am not pointing fingers at anyone except the version of me who thought keeping tiny outfits “just in case” was a reasonable plan.
No wonder we were drowning.
Why We Had to Declutter Before We Could Organize
This is the part they do not tell you in the organization videos. You cannot organize your way out of too much stuff. You can buy all the bins in the world — and believe me, I have considered it — but if the volume is the problem, the bins just give the chaos somewhere to hide.
So before I could fix the laundry situation, I had to deal with the stuff situation.
That meant actually going through it. Not shuffling it. Not reorganizing it into a different pile. Actually touching each thing and asking the only question that mattered: do I actually use this, or am I just keeping it because I used to?
The office wardrobe? Almost all of it is going. The suits, the heels, the bags I carried to meetings that no longer exist in my daily life. I held onto them for years because they represented a version of me I had spent a long time building. But that version wore a size 0 and commuted every day and did not have a toddler on her hip. She was great. She is also gone. And her wardrobe needs to go with her.
The kids’ stuff is getting the same treatment. If it does not fit, it goes. If nobody reaches for it, it goes. If I cannot remember the last time I washed it because nobody ever wears it, it definitely goes.
Want some of it? I am listing clothes, baby items, bags, and more over on my Poshmark — come take a look. There is a lot, and it needs a new home.
The Imperfect Plan (No Color-Coding Required)
Once I started pulling out what actually needed to leave, the laundry situation became a lot more manageable. Not perfect. But manageable.
Here is the actual approach I used — nothing fancy, nothing that needs a label maker.
Declutter before you organize. This is the step I skipped for years and I am begging you not to skip it. Less stuff means less laundry, which means a smaller mountain to manage. Start there.
Touch it once. Wash it, dry it, put it away before starting the next load. Not staged in a basket. Not “I’ll fold it later.” Away. Actually away.
Lower the bar on “put away.” In this house, put away means it is off the floor and in a general location. A shelf. A drawer. A bin. Perfect folding is not happening with four kids and a job. Functional is the goal.
Involve the kids. Not in a Pinterest parenting way — in a “you live here too and I need help” way. Did they help perfectly? No. Did it take some pressure off? A little. And a little matters.
Use the chute for what it is. That hole in the floor is actually useful if you commit to dealing with what lands in the basement. Laundry goes down. Laundry gets done. Laundry comes back up. That is the deal.
Want to know what has actually helped on the practical side? I have an Amazon storefront with the things that are genuinely working for me — nothing aspirational, nothing that lives on a shelf looking pretty. Real stuff that earns its place in a chaotic house.
Small Wins and Real Progress
Here is what actually changed.
The bedroom floor is visible now. Not the whole floor — but enough that I can walk through without stepping on anything. The morning routine is slightly less chaotic. We can find things now, most of the time. That alone has taken a few minutes of stress out of each morning, and a few minutes matters when you are already rushing.
The pile is genuinely smaller. Not because I got better at laundry. Because there is less laundry to do.
Here is what has not changed.
There is still a basket of clean laundry sitting at the top of the stairs waiting to go into a room. The dog’s towels are still in a pile I keep meaning to deal with. The bedroom still does not have a real door.
And that is okay. It took years to build up to this level of chaos. It is not going to unwind in a week. What matters is that we moved the needle. Tomorrow morning will be a little easier than last week’s morning was.
That is progress. Real, imperfect, unglamorous progress.
This Summer Is Not About Pinterest
The goal of this whole series was never to end up with a magazine-worthy home. It was to be honest about what it actually looks like to build a better home slowly, on a real budget, in the middle of real life.
The laundry week taught me something I did not expect: sometimes the project you think you are solving is just pointing at a bigger one underneath it. The laundry was not the problem. The stuff was. And the stuff was tied to a whole chapter of my life I had been quietly hauling around without really looking at it.
That is okay too. We deal with it when we are ready, and apparently I was ready now.
If your laundry is still winning, if your house looks nothing like the internet says it should, if you are standing in a pile of clothes from a version of yourself that does not quite exist anymore — you are not failing. You are just in the middle of it. Same as me.
We will figure it out one pile at a time.
