Laundry Love: Finding Joy in a Common Chore by Patric Richardson (with Karin B. Miller) is easily my favorite book about laundry.
Yes, I’ve read multiple books about doing laundry. Let’s just move right along from that.
Anyway, as the title suggests, it is a love letter to my favorite chore. It’s so much more than that, though. Aside from the diatribe against fabric softener and dryer sheets (which, fair – they are pretty awful for both humans and the environment…but so would my calmly and rationally maiming everyone around me after having to endure 45,624 small daily electrocutions from static should I decide to go without them) and the suggestion that I not launder my clothes every time I wear them (In summer?!? In Texas?!?! No, thank you. Please everyone around me – wash your clothes), it is also a great handbook for doing laundry so well that you end up not only loving the process but also the results.
I am a sucker for a homemaking book of any kind that spells it out for brand-new adults. Someone who is leaving home for the first time and has never done laundry before could read this book and not feel so intimidated in the laundry room at their dorm.
But the authors don’t stop there.
They also give more advanced tips. For example, they explain how to care for wool and other fabrics that have those bossy tags that read, “Dry clean only.” If you go to the cleaners often, this book could pay for itself in just one month. They touch on the intricacies of ironing, and there is a fantastic section on how to remove different kinds of stains. I probably reference that section most often.
Richardson and Miller’s tips work for those who have a washer and dryer at home as well as those who visit the laundromat (which I sometimes still do, if I have more than three loads to do in one day and not enough time to do them separately – it’s so much faster). Their advice works for people who live alone and those with big families.
This is the book I would write if I wrote a whole book about laundry.
My main tip for laundry is this – incorporate it into other work. This is the easiest chore to stack. Start the laundry before you begin working on something else, and you’ll be doing two chores at once. This is another reason it’s my favorite. Now that I’m working from home three days a week, I can get most of my laundry done during the day. I put a load in the washer in the morning before I start work. I switch it to the dryer at lunch, and it’s ready to fold when I log off for the day.
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