How To Sort Laundry

Most of us find laundry to be a challenge, but these easy tips for sorting your laundry will help you to begin, and will make making doing laundry easier!

Sort your laundry into 3 categories:

Whites
Lights
Darks

If you don’t use Clorox (bleach) in your whites, you can wash the lights and whites together.

If you do use Clorox in your laundry, use it only on white cotton or cotton blend items. This would include things like cotton socks, underwear, tea towels, dish rags, white bath towels, wash rags, etc.

Clorox works great for these things but it will cause nylon, polyester and some other things to turn gray.

Other categories that you can sort into are:

Towels or washrags and things like them, which cause lint.
Greasy or extra dirty things like overalls or work clothes. Wash them separately.
Heavy things like jeans and pants. I wash them separately from my more delicate darks.
Delicate items like some sweaters or lingerie need to be washed separately on a gentle cycle.
Throw rugs should be washed separately from your regular clothes.
Cleaning rags, especially if it is something you have used to clean the toilet or wipe down a floor, should be washed separately from other things to prevent cross contamination. To be honest, I usually just throw these rags away just to be safe, but if you keep yours then wash them separately.
Fuzzy blankets or things that shed should be laundered separately.
Bright red items should be washed separately until you can see if they’re going to bleed or not.

My daughter in law had reddish maroon towels and lots of red t-shirts so she would wash them together and she didn’t have to worry about bleeding.

This may seem like a lot of work but it will reduce wear and tear on your clothes and will lengthen the useful life of your clothes, saving clothes that you would have had to toss because of bleeding and dinginess.

If all else fails, read the label on your clothes.

I don’t always do exactly as the label says but, if you are a novice at laundry, it will be a good guideline. For you more seasoned washers, use your own common sense and past knowledge. These days, many clothes manufacturers say “dry clean only” just to protect themselves, so there are some things you may not have to dry clean. If I pay only a couple of dollars for something and it says “dry clean only,” I will wash it myself just because I don’t have much to lose if I ruin it.

You can find many more helpful laundry tips like this in our How To Organize And Clean Your Home laundry e book.

-Jill