Do you have that one thing in your house that just gives you anxiety when you look at it; or you’re so overwhelmed when you look at it but have no idea where to even start to fix it so you don’t have that overwhelmed feeling? For me, it was laundry baskets full of clean clothes that were scattered all over my house. Laundry baskets were everywhere I looked. No matter where I walked in my house, I felt like there was a laundry basket of clean clothes waiting for me to fold. I was always shuffling around the baskets to other rooms too, depending on if someone was coming over and I needed to hide them. We lived out of these baskets! The clothes were clean but never put away. I started to get fed up! I hated seeing the baskets everywhere, I hated having to shuffle them all over just to make the house “clean” and I hated that we never had clothes put away!
In a fit of frustration and desperation one day, I just decided to get rid of all the baskets but one. I knew that if I didn’t have the baskets available to use, then I would stop seeing baskets and baskets full of clean clothes all around my house. I decided on one “rule” that I made for myself on this day of frustration too. Now, when you read the word rule, please don’t think that I am so rigid with myself that I could never mess up or not follow the rule. I in fact do mess up and sometimes don’t follow the rule I gave myself. But I knew I needed to have some boundaries, or I was going to end up just having piles of clothes everywhere instead of them in baskets everywhere.
My one rule:
No removing the clothes from the dryer and piling them onto any surface. I would fold it from the dryer. If that means that clothes sit for days because I was feeling lazy or didn’t get around to it, then so does the load that needs to put in the dryer from the washer. This was good motivation for me to follow through on folding from the dryer promptly.
I also went through and decreased the amount of clothes we had, and I continue to do that a couple times a year. The less clothes you have, the less you need to wash and fold.
Over the years, I’ve realized that the mindset around the laundry was what was really the problem. I could have chosen to keep all the baskets and had a rule that the clothes get folded before bed every night, it wouldn’t have mattered, fixing my mindset was what got the clothes folded and put away.
When I just stopped giving myself excuses as to why I couldn’t fold the laundry, it got done. My biggest excuse was it would take too long, or I don’t have time for that right now. When, in reality, it takes me 10 minutes tops to fold a load of laundry and put it away. It wasn’t that I didn’t have time, it was that I gave myself the excuse that I didn’t have time. Once I started holding myself accountable, the laundry was no longer a problem. I don’t have anxiety about baskets full of laundry anymore and I never stress over getting the laundry done.
This mindset shift just around the laundry has changed the way my home feels because I’m calmer about it.
Do you have an area in your home that just stresses you out and you NEED it to change? Get ruthless with purging items you don’t need and then make the rule for yourself, hold yourself accountable. I promise you will feel a difference in yourself and in your home when you do this 🙂