Why You Might Want To Invest In More Than One Laundry Basket

Laundry seems like a never-ending chore, especially if you have a busy household. While there are some common trends that everyone gets wrong when doing laundry, there's one quick and inexpensive trick that you can incorporate today to help you stay organized during wash day — investing in more than one laundry basket. Using multiple baskets prevents dirty clothes from piling up in spaces like bathrooms and bedrooms, and color-coding them is a fun way to get kids involved with this chore. To save time on laundry day, each person can use their own color bin. This way, everyone sorts their own laundry, avoiding the hassle of separating a massive pile of clothes.

Multiple baskets also help you sort specialized laundry. Having a hamper for "special care" items, like lingerie and delicate fabrics, or a different basket for heavily-soiled work clothes, can help you wash these items more efficiently and keep like items together, separate from other clothing. After all, no one wants to find a grease-covered shirt mixed in with a delicate silk blouse. Plus, the extra containers encourage you to tackle the important steps you shouldn't skip before starting a load of laundry, like sorting by color and fabric type. But there are even more benefits to having two (or three) baskets around your home. This simple purchase can help make the chore of doing laundry even less tedious.

Besides using multiple hampers to keep your family's laundry organized by person or fabric type, you can also use this hack to keep track of which laundry is dirty and which is clean — especially if you lead a busy life and clean laundry happens to sit around for a while before it's put away. No judgement — we've all been there when one load is fresh out of the dryer but there's no time to put it away. But when your clean clothes is sitting in the laundry basket, where does the dirty garments go? When you learn what really happens if you store dirty laundry in the washing machine, you'll think twice about using that as your storage location. Having multiple baskets (like a "clean laundry" and "dirty laundry" one) can help alleviate this storage problem. Plus, this organization tip will stop you from accidentally washing the clean clothes a second time, which wastes water and detergent.

Along this same line of thought, having a dedicated "clean" and "dirty" laundry basket can help ensure that your freshly washed clothes stay clean. Depending on your lifestyle, if you have dirt, germs, blood, or even grease on your clothes, that grime could rub off onto the basket itself, leaving residue. Now imagine putting your nice clean fluffy towels or child's pajamas into that dirty basket — the transfer of yuck onto those clean clothes can be downright gross. A separate basket will make your laundry routine more hygienic overall.