The Never-Ending Laundry

Happy New Year and "hello 2014", it's 4th January and my laundry basket overfloweth. This seems to be how I start most years, thanks to a superstition about doing laundry on New Year's Day and "washing" a member of the family away. (Occasionally it seems that if you could nominate who to "wash away", it might be quite a good idea.) Of course, that doesn't explain everything. The only answer I can come up with is that the laundry basket is like "The Magic Porridge Pot" in the children's tale. Does that mean that if I say the right words there will be no more clothes to wash? I don't think so.

This morning I approached a laundry pile that looks like this:

Fortunately it's on the landing where most visitors to the house will never see it, but our recent decision to sell the house changes that. Somehow I have to tackle the never-ending laundry and it's evil twin the huge heap of ironing that lives on the sofa and return it to a manageable level before we invite people to judge the value of our home and whether they would like to live in it. To reach that goal I intend to use several powerful weapons:

1) Fly Lady. Yes, I've been Flywashed! If you need a way to gain control of an out of control home, FlyLady's babysteps are a good way to start. Marla (THE FlyLady) encourages everyone to gain control of Mount Washmore by washing a load a day. It certainly helps.

2) Hand wash on sunny days. On my journey to the bottom of the washing pile today, I found that a significant volume of the pile is created by a small number of handwash only garments. I have a bottle of Soak (rinse-free washing solution) ready to use, I just need a dry day. (Did you spot the shameless self-promotion there?!)

3) Reduce the amount of potential washing. I love clothes but have to admit that I may have too many. I suspect that my girls have outgrown quite a few items too. Time for a cull methinks. (There's probably a future blog post in that too.)

4) My Dad suggests a skip would solve most of my clutter problems but I'm putting that on hold for now as I feel it's a little extreme.

I've tried to start with enthusiasm today. I've run the washing machine three times and the house now has damp laundry everywhere. Tomorrow I can tackle the ironing while running another wash load and putting the Christmas decorations away (plus cooking Sunday lunch, checking school bags and supervising craft activities). Does anyone know where I can get another three hours in a day and another two arms?