I Am the Laundry Bitch
Monday, June 16, 2008
Last night I was trying to fall asleep when I started thinking about the amount of time I spend doing laundry each week since it's one of a few household duties that I do almost exclusively. It always seems like there is a lot to do but I started trying to quantify it.
There are 5 people in our household, so each week I launder:
~42 socks(the baby and I go barefoot 99% of the time)actually closer to 48 since boy often goes through a second pair when he finds a way to get first pair soaked.
~28 pairs of underwear(more like 26 because my son will go commando if not reminded.)
~Assuming a top and a bottom for each of us, 70 individual shirts, pants, skirts and shorts.
~I force the kids to wear jammies more than once and SD and I sleep nekkid so between the kids, I'd say, about 22 pieces each week.
~10 bath towels each week
~20 face towels per week
~At least 21 kitchen towels because my son and husband get a new one each time they dry their hands and then it ends up in the sink soaked and smelly.
~Assorted bathrobes, sheets, baby blankets, swimsuits, probably 20 pieces.
That's 237 individual pieces of laundry. My son typically empties the hampers, so if I separate, put in the washer, move to the dryer, fold and put away 237 pieces of laundry, it amounts to 1185 times my hands touch one week's worth of laundry.
If I do roughly this amount of laundry from the birth of the first child to the 18th year of the baby, this amounts to 25 years of laundry, which is 1300 weeks of laundry or 308,100 pieces of laundry or 1,540,500 'steps' while our kids live with us. This is not inclusive of the laundry I did before having kids or the laundry I will do after our kids leave the house.
This also doesn't include the multiple times my now 7 year old has dumped a pile of clean clothes in the hamper when I asked him to put away his own laundry. It also does not include the multiple outfits the kids went through with diaper blowouts and potty training or the baby's future potty training time and higher total output as she gets older.
I looked online and the lowest price charged for laundry is $.50 per piece(not including pickup and delivery). So, the minimum cost of outsourcing our laundry(not accounting for inflation and increased output over time) is $154,050 or a little more than $6,000 each year over the 25 years.
This being the case, I think my laundry room should look like this. I can dream right?
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If my laundry room looked like that- instead of a sea of dirty clothes, I could be persuaded to do laundry more often....maybe.....
Is that not the most beautiful laundry room eva? It's like a laundry spa.
Ha, the hand towel drawer is empty at least once a week so I use my shirt/pants to dry my hands!