How to Do Laundry (Part 1 of 7): Introduction

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Learning how to do laundry is a life skill everyone that wears clean clothes needs to learn. This seven part series will teach you the basic skills of Laundry 101.

As a household manager you are in charge of the laundry, but that does not mean you need to do the laundry all by yourself.

Everyone in your family wears clothes, and therefore everyone (well almost everyone, since some of us have babies) is capable of helping with the household's laundry.

Feel free to enlist anyone or everyone in your family to help with some or all parts of the steps in Laundry 101, up to their level of ability (and certain steps of the process can be done by a three year old, or younger).

Laundry Is A Cycle

The first thing to understand when learning how to do laundry is that laundry is a cycle.

Obviously, you start with clean clothes or linens, you wear or use them, and then they get dirty again. That is the easy part, it seems.

The part we are focusing on, the part that is difficult, is the next series of steps where the dirty clothes get clean, and ready for your family to wear or use again.

Each of the steps listed below is necessary to get the clothes and other fabrics ready for another use.

Most laundry problems occur because of a malfunction in one or more of these steps.

You have heard the phrase, "you are only as strong as your weakest link," right? The same principle applies to these laundry instructions.

If one step does not get done, the whole system can collapse or at least be much more inefficient and ineffective.