Move the Hanger
Recently I realized that over the course of a year I had accidentally overhauled and simplified the way my family dealt with laundry.
Doing laundry isn’t my favorite thing, but on a whole I don’t mind it. It’s better than running the vacuum and way better than grocery shopping! However during busy times of the year, our family’s laundry tends to get away from me. For most of my married life – both before and after kids – laundry would pile up, my husband and I would spend an entire weekend doing 84,000 batches of laundry which we would then fold and put in baskets. And that’s where the system broke down. The baskets never got emptied. Which is a drag if you are scrambling on a Tuesday to find a purple shirt for purple shirt day for your youngest or the class T-shirt for your oldest and you’re rummaging through baskets of laundry basically unfolding everything you spent an entire weekend folding.
The laundry system wasn’t broken, it just wasn’t really doing much to help keep our household moving forward. A few years ago when the shelving in my closet came crashing down my husband declared he was running to Lowes to get materials for a new upgraded closet system (he is super handy) and while he was gone I sat on the floor of my closet sorting through things that were old or didn’t fit to give to Goodwill. Later that night we had a whole new closet system installed, I had pared down my closet and I was left with a bunch of empty hangers which I stashed away in one section of my closet.
HOW A BUNCH OF EMPTY HANGERS CHANGED OUR LAUNDRY GAME!
Over the next few weeks when I did my laundry I found I was more diligent about going to my closet and pulling out those empty hangers to hang wet shirts to dry. When everything was dry it went right back into my neatly organized closet and all of a sudden I realized my clean laundry was no longer languishing in a basket. When I wore a shirt, I took the hanger and moved it to the empty hanger spot. I know this seems simple and intuitive but it was a total game changer for my whole approach to laundry. So I started doing the same thing with my kids’ laundry – I asked them to move their empty hangers to one spot and when I did their laundry I pulled out all of their empty hangers, hung their clean shirts to dry then whisked them right back into their closet. Within a year I had accidentally transformed our entire laundry process. No more piles of laundry hanging out in baskets for days and weeks at a time.
FIND YOUR SHORTCUT!
So all of this had me thinking. What other household obstacles could be simplified in the same way? Could I simply move the hanger so to speak and transform my whole homeoffice filing disaster into some sort of easy process? I started with my kids mountains of school paperwork and set up a binder for each of them that sits near my kitchen with a hole punch. If anything comes home – I MEAN ANYTHING! – that I need to keep track of for them I punch it and immediately file it in the binder. School picture forms, bus passes, report cards, birthday party invitations, paperwork for sports teams; it all goes in the binder. I am currently working on transforming my office files into binders as well. What better way to have insurance forms, mortgage statements, tax paperwork all at the ready then by using a binder? I had moved the hanger with all of those mounds of paperwork as well.
HAVE A “MOVE YOUR HANGER” TIP YOU WOULD LIKE TO SHARE?
Over the next year I want to tackle my system for storing holiday decorations (it’s a mess!) and clean out a few ancillary closets using this same approach. I think sometimes an easy solution to many of our day to day stumbling blocks can be as easy as just moving an empty hanger to one place in a closet. Have you ever accidentally or purposely changed your approach to a task you once dreaded to create an easier way of going about things? I’d love to hear your ideas!