plans for a family closet.

So, I'm starting to hit that late stage of pregnancy where everything feels very imminent, and I get that 'thing' (nesting?) in me that tells me I need to do All the Projects and paint All the Things.  Last night, we were all sitting around watching a movie for family movie night, and I just kept staring at the basement ceiling, wondering how many weeks it would take me to paint the ceiling, trim, and walls of all 1000 square feet down there... and if it was realistic to hope to accomplish it before the baby comes.

I realize it's not.  I also realize it's in no way necessary at this point in life.  But I just get so itchy.  Like, I'm also currently dying to just cut a big hole in the dining room wall and put in a sliding door.  Also not realistic or necessary, even though I WANT TO SO BADLY.

So I'm turning my attention to an actual problem that needs an actual solution sooner rather than later: clothing storage.  Right now, the kids are sharing three dressers between the five of them, and there is no room for another kid's clothes.  We also don't have room for another dresser in the house.  (In fact, Todd's dresser is currently housed in the garage because we can't fit it in here.)  Conundrum. 

But you know what I do have room for?  A family closet in the laundry room.  WHAT?! Wouldn't that just be the best?  A single place to keep all the kids' clothes - one area, one piece of furniture, right next to the washer and dryer?  Angels, people.  I hear angels.

But the thing is... here is the side of the laundry room that I've set my sights on:

It's already full of bins.  So, the simple solution is to move the bins.  But this is my only storage area, so I can only move them to the garage.  Even once I've reconciled myself to the possibility of mold and mice getting into them if they're stored out there, I run into the problem of not having a ton of space there either.  But I could make space... if I take the old loveseat to Goodwill, and sell the jogging stroller and single stroller, and give our old coffee table away, and buy some shelves to get the rest of the boxes off the floor.  Simple enough, right?  Realistic to accomplish in the next few weeks?

And then I could actually set up the closet system.  I almost never hang any of the kids' clothes, so I only need to worry about getting drawers or tubs for everything.  (Their church clothes are hanging in an upstairs closet, which would probably just stay the same.)  I'm thinking I'll set up this:

via

And for drawers, I'll label these with each owner's initial and the intended contents:

via

Clothes for Rocco and the new baby would still be stored in the nursery, so I'd currently only need to use four rows of the five available.  I'd give Atticus the highest row, and down the line, and use the uppermost row for storage of right size/wrong season clothes for each of them.

You guys, I'm basically foaming at the mouth thinking about this.  I need to make this happen.  And I have basically no time in the next couple of months in which to clean out the garage, move bins, make a trip to Ikea, set it all up, move the kids' clothes into it, and set up a streamlined system before the baby comes, but I am praying hard that it can somehow miraculously happen.  I need this, people, or I'm a-scary-amount tempted to take a sledgehammer to the dining room wall.


*For some more family closet inspiration, I do have quite a few related things (and some unrelated things) pinned on this board, if you're curious.

what time is it? LAUNDRY TIME! (again. still. hooray!)

Just like I promised, I'm back with more laundry talk.  WOOOOOOHOOOOOOOOOOO!  Let's talk products today, okay?

I will preface this by saying that I like to pretend I'm a purist, but when push comes to shove, I'm a realist.  I would love to stick dogmatically to principles about parabens and pthalates and fragrances and carcinogens... but, to put it bluntly, I also have a side gig called a real life.  I'm super open-minded to trying all kinds of natural methods of doing stuff (I can give you a rundown on all my failed efforts sometime), but I'm going to shoot you straight: if it doesn't live up to my standards for actually doing its job well, I don't use it.  And sometimes natural products just don't work very well.

Case in point: Stain Remover.

I use good ol' Shout.  I've been using it since college, and it works.  I deal with a lot of stains - breastmilk and formula vomit, blood, grease, chocolate, grass, paint, poop, popsicles, infection-related snot, pit sweat.  I have to be ever-vigilant in my war against stains, and I refuse to man my laundry cavalry with the simply well-intentioned.  No.  I will pay mercenaries to fight my stain battles.  And Shout is a mercenary.  Sure, it's probably loaded with all kinds of hormone disruptors and carcinogens and bad chi.  But it's not like I'm letting my kids eat it or anything, and it gets the job done like a boss, so I'm at peace with my life choices.

I keep a bottle under the sink in our bathroom, where most of us get undressed at the end of the day, so we can just deal with pre-treating any issues before they make it into the 'big' laundry.  I also keep a bottle on the shelf above the washer, because I often find guerrilla stains lurking around when I go to put stuff in.  Stains don't fight fair, so you have to be prepared at all times.

(I buy Shout at Walmart.)  (And, only because it's too funny not to mention, I accidentally just typed, "I buy Shitout at Walmart."  I think it's still an apt name.  Perhaps even more so.)

Detergent

For detergent, I am an ever-faithful Biokleen groupie.  I am getting ready to bust open my fourth five-gallon bucket of this stuff.  Do the math on that.  In the last few years, I have gone through fifteen gallons of this detergent, one tablespoon at a time.  I clearly speak from experience when I say this stuff is worth buying by the drum.  (Or, by the normal-sized bottle, if you, unlike me, are a normal person, with a normal-person-sized family and a normal-person amount of poop in your weekly laundry.)  It doesn't build up in the towels, eventually making them smelly and nonabsorbent.  It gets underwear clean.  It's safe for the environment and nontoxic to pets and kids.  It doesn't cost gold shekels.  It doesn't smell like anything.  So laundry just comes out smelling like warm fabric.  Which I prefer for reasons such as parabens and pseudoestrogens and other science facts.

(I buy Biokleen detergent through Azure Standard, but it's available through Amazon and many bulk sites as well.)

Most loads only involve these two products.  I'm serious.  No fabric softener, no laundry sheets, no boosters, no whiteners, no bleach.  A few sprays of Shout and a tablespoon of detergent, and I'm good to go.

HOWEVER.

The funky load.  You know the one I'm talking about.  The one that smells like wet hair and zombie breath.  The one that, for no apparent reason (other than the fact that you left it sitting wet in the washer for 36 hours), has begun to ferment.  YOU KNOW the one I'm talking about.  So you also know that sometimes it's necessary to bust out the big guns.

First, those perennial laundry besties: Washing Soda + Borax.  4ever.

I don't know why these work.  I don't know what's in them or where they come from or whether they have other uses.  I don't know if they're married or 'just friends' or simply Burt-and-Ernie-ing.  I just know they work, and they work best together.  And they're integral ingredients in most "DIY SO-NATURAL-YOU-COULD-EAT-IT-BUT-DON'T!" homemade laundry detergent recipes.  So apparently they're natural.  According to Pinterest.  Good enough for me.

I just dump half a cup of each one into the load alongside the detergent, and whammo blammo, Funk-B-Gon.  (These also help when your towels start smelling weird and need to be stripped of buildup.)

(They carry both of these at Walmart, and they're each under five bucks.)

And my silver bullet: Biokleen Bac-Out.  I think this is made from the sweat of worker bees?  Something like that.  In the loads that are just above-and-beyond nasty (think, left-in-the-washer-for-three-days-IN-AUGUST, or mildewy-washcloth-that-got-misplaced-behind-the-hamper, or worst of all, cloth-diapers-that-got-left-in-the-pail-too-long) I add a big squeeze of this stuff to the load in addition to the washing soda and borax, and everything comes out smelling like daisies.  Or, really, it comes out smelling like clean, neutral, warm fabric.  Just like I like it.

(I also get this through Azure Standard, but Amazon and Vitacost both carry it as well.)

And those are my favorite laundry products.  Does anyone have anything else they love?

how we do: our laundry routine.

Oh, laundry.  It's been on my mind a lot lately, since I'm super behind on it, what with changing seasons and the resulting changing wardrobes and bedding.  While I admit that I do like being clothed, I hate actually having to deal with the responsibilities that come with being clothed, and clothing my children.  I'm up to my eyeballs in laundry right now, and admittedly, I like cussing at the laundry like it's somehow the sheets' fault that stuff is piling up.

If it was just a matter washing and drying, I'd be fine.  I'm usually a load or two away from everything being clean.  It's just the folding and sorting and putting away that I'm terrible at.

That being said, I've found a few things that make large-family laundry a little easier, and I thought I'd share.  Because I've been a terrible blogger lately and am trying to stretch out my material so I can blog a little more often this week, AND because I've spent nearly ten years trying to perfect a laundry routine that doesn't make me want to throw in the towel and become a nudist, I'm going to space this out over a couple of days. Thrilling idea for a series, isn't it?

Anyway, here we go.  Let's talk laundry routine today.

Our routine:  

Our Cedar Falls house had a laundry chute on both floors that would just drop laundry right in front of the washer, which was DELIGHTFUL.  Sadly, I don't have that luxury here, so I've had to set up hampers in most rooms - one in the girls' room, one in the boys' room, one in the nursery, and one under the kitchen sink.  Bathroom and adult laundry get dumped into the girls' hamper.  Once a day, it is Atticus' job to haul all the laundry to the laundry room.  Normal laundry gets dumped into a pile; nasty kitchen laundry gets dumped into its own separate container to stew - ahem, I mean, in order to get washed first and to not mildew everything else.

I don't really have a set day to run all the laundry through the washer.  It just kind of happens whenever it occurs to me, but I try to get caught up with everything by Monday or Tuesday.  I am not of the mentality that laundry is something that should happen everyday.  Oh my word, I'd kill myself if I had to think about laundry every day.  Blech.  Instead, I just let stuff pile up in the laundry room through the week, trying my best to keep the clean laundry baskets separate from the dirty laundry baskets.

I only sort into Hot, Cold, and Jeans.  I mean, if there's like a pair of red socks or something hanging around, I might do a small load of darks, just in case, but honestly, I'm probably more likely to just throw the red socks away so I don't have to ever think that hard about laundry again.  "Hot" items are those with smells, germs, or (pre-treated) stains.  That's it.  White Tshirts get washed in cold because anything and everything that doesn't have smells, germs or stains gets the cold water treatment.  Why? Because cold water is cheaper than hot water and it doesn't steal precious hot water from my molten-lava showers.  Rock-solid reasoning right there.

I'm uppity about jeans belonging to me and Todd, otherwise I'd just throw them in with a regular cold water load.  We like spending a little more money on nicer jeans (but having fewer pairs of them, so it evens out), so I like to treat them as well as possible.  We try to go as long as possible between washes, but when they do need to be washed, I button the waist, turn them inside out, wash them on cold, and line-dry them.  Our jeans get more special treatment than our kids.  Don't judge.

Now, once everything's washed and dried, you're probably wondering when I fold it.  Because you're intensely interested in the details of my laundry routine.  See?  I knew it.  On Wednesday afternoons, before the big kids get the special privilege of doing their scheduled 'Arts and Crafts' time for the week, they sit and fold laundry with me.  They're responsible for folding all socks, underwear and washcloths for the whole family, as well as all kids' clothing.  They are also then responsible for putting away their own laundry.  We listen to audiobooks or Adventures in Odyssey while we fold, and an entire week's worth of laundry usually takes us about 45 minutes.   The kids earn double stickers for this.

Laundry day for a family of six after being utterly immobilized by morning sickness for six weeks. Today's stats: 22 stacks. 70 pairs of underwear. 91 matched pairs of socks. Brutal.

A photo posted by Paige Van Voorst (@theminivanvoorsts) on Apr 19, 2015 at 12:52pm PDT

And those are the details of our weekly routine - how we keep the laundry from piling up and consuming us.  You may have noticed that I didn't detail how I stay on top of actually putting away all the folded clothes, so I'll tell you.  My method basically consists of letting it sit around in laundry baskets in our room for a month, while I pull out towels and underwear as needed, until the basket is basically empty again.  Is it efficient?  Absolutely not.  But as I can't seem to break the habit, I guess I should just embrace it.

In case I drop the ball and miss a day or six of posting this week, and you're getting desperate to read about more Van Voorst laundry, you can pop to this past post of my laundry room and routine from waaaaay back when we lived in Story City.