Organize Your Kitchen Laundry

I’ve been having a laundry issue in my kitchen...

There are dishcloths, tea towels, napkins and the facecloths we use to wipe down the sticky Kid after every meal that pile up every day. And then there are the dirty clothes that Kid is always stripping off as he walks in the door – sometimes at our request when he has been playing in the dirt and sometimes of his own volition (man that kid enjoys hanging out in his underwear!) – that always wind up in the kitchen. This adds up to little piles of not only dirty, but often damp, laundry in my kitchen.

Upstairs, we have a laundry bin in the closet where we all put the dirty laundry so that it is altogether and out of site. But on the main floor of our house, any laundry generated here ends up sitting in the kitchen on its way down to the laundry area in the basement.

A few months ago, I put a lidded basket in the kitchen as a place to gather it up out of sight before it gets taken downstairs. Unfortunately, I realized pretty quickly that the plan wasn’t going to work. We need that basket to store toys for the Kid to play with while I make dinner. So we’ve been putting any dirty laundry on top of the basket instead. This has been driving me NUTS!! I can’t stand seeing it there. Just as a pile gets taken to the basement, something new replaces it. Argh!

So if the basket wasn’t working, I needed to come up with a new plan. I recently purchased a mesh (breathable!) laundry bag and one of those removable plastic hooks. Today I put the hook on the backside of the door leading down to the basement and hung the bag on it. I did it halfway down the door so that it is totally reachable for the Kid to put his own stuff in there.

I’m hoping this new plan will do the trick. We’ll see how it works. If not, I’d love to have some back-up ideas in place. If you have a good system for collecting kitchen laundry, I’d love to hear about it!