The Castle Laundry Room

I’ve had a lot of requests that I share about our Castle Laundry Room. Here it is!

Our laundry room is in the basement, and it is a huge, functional room!

But here’s a little reminder of what our laundry room looked like the first week we moved in. It was FULLLLLL of linens and towels – like enough to run not just a Bed and Breakfast (as this property had been used before we purchased it) but enough to run a hotel. We spent hours clearing it out so that we can use it for our family’s needs.

We carted out 18 big black yard waste bags full of bedding, and then I stopped counting. I think Goodwill probably didn’t know what hit them that week. ;)

—>Pssst! Here’s an explanation of why we are calling our house our Castle. God is good, and this shares some of His goodness in meeting our needs. <—

Once we got the room cleared out, we started to form a plan – one that I’d thought of before we moved in.

See, my dilemma was that I do laundry for our seven littles plus Matt and me. We are all on the second floor of our Castle, and laundry is in the basement. You can imagine that laundry for nine people is quite a bit of laundry! I didn’t love the idea of lugging it up and down stairs over and over and over. And most of our kids are too little at this point to lug it themselves.

I had already stopped folding the laundry

Remember this? A year or so ago, I gave up on folding the 7 littles’ laundry. Here are all my reasons and I hold to the fact that this makes everything SO much easier. Folded onesies for BabyBoy#11 are ridiculous, toddlers rummaging through drawers destroy folding anyway, and even our 8 and 9-year-olds can’t keep their clothes folded long enough to make it from folding spot to drawer.

Folding clothes became a pointless job, so I gave up and do this instead. Now that we had moved into our Castle, I took this idea to a new level.

No dressers. All clothes stay in the laundry room.

We have an entire wall of shelves in the laundry room that are now like this:

When I do a load of laundry, instead of lugging it upstairs to our second floor to put it all away, instead I toss each item of clothing into its correct bin, cube, or basket. Like this:

This is a game changer! I still don’t keep up with laundry, but I sure do keep up better than I would if I were lugging laundry up and down, folding it all, and putting it away in dressers.

What I do lug upstairs

Matt and I do have dressers, because we’re grown ups and can handle them. They are in our bedroom because we don’t want to go to the basement for our shirts. :) So after I’ve sorted the seven littles’ laundry out of each load, I take these upstairs:

• Matt’s clothes
• my clothes
• kitchen towels
• bath towels

Sometimes these sit in the basket for days. Sometimes I empty the basket and put everything away in twenty minutes. It all depends on what is a priority at the moment, and usually, the priority isn’t putting away laundry. :)

How does it work to have the littles’ clothes in the basement?

It’s working great! We weren’t sure – would we really want to go to the basement every time we needed something for one of them? Well, as it turns out, we’d either be going up (to the second floor) or down (to the basement) – so it’s the same amount of steps no matter what. And being able to stand at the dryer and toss clothes directly into their tub? Amazingly efficient! Overall, we save a lot of effort doing it this way.

And Brayden, Kiya, and Keith – who are old enough to dress themselves – can go to the basement, change out of their dirty clothes, put their dirties in the hampers, and put on their clean clothes all in one place. At the beginning of each day, I run to the basement and grab clothes for the littlest four and head upstairs to start the process of getting them dressed. Easy! (I mean, as easy as it is to dress four toddlers/baby.)

I suppose you might want to see the washers/dryers?

The white set we brought from our York house. The silver set we inherited with the Castle. They are NICE and they are big. As are my piles of laundry – one of which is featured here.

We don’t actually have the white set completely usable yet, so at this point, we’ve all been using the big silver set. Somehow, this is working out fine – even with 16 people’s laundry being done here! Having the second set available will be nice eventually. But there are so many other priorities right now (like feeding the children and keeping them out of the street).

So there you have it! The Castle Laundry Room!