I always think that January is always the month you notice the house, I think. You take down all the Christmas decs, and the house looks bare.
And grubby.
you suddenly notice all the dust that’s been hiding in the twinkly fairylight glow. And of course, once you start tidying and sorting, you get on a roll.
We never have as clean a house as we do a couple of days before Christmas. And we never have as organised a house as we do in the middle of January. Sorting all the Christmas paraphernalia into its plastic crates and back up into the loft starts the Let’s-Get-Organised mania. All of a sudden I find myself shifting the dusty motherload under the bed, sorting kids paraphernalia into store/donate/rubbish piles, and replacing old and battered items that have been overlooked for too long.
One of those is our wicker laundry bin – we’ve had it for maybe 15yrs, and the wicker is ever-shredding. It catches on clothes, it splinters bits onto the carpet, and everytime I heft it up and downstairs I swear I’ll replace it.
And lo, the time has come.
But who knew? The CHOICES!
I thought a laundry basket was a … y’know… laundry basket. Pretty straightforward.
but no no no.
Take a look at the Brabantia Laundry bin page, for example…
Of course there’s the straightforward laundry bin in their trademark style – though there’s two sizes to choose from. I ifnd a smaller one does fine in the kids rooms, but I use our bedroom laundry bin for towels etc (bedding goes straight into the machine, no room for that to loiter), so a bigger one is needed. But then they went and got clever on me. There’s the ‘selector’ – so you can divide whites and coloureds at the point of night-time-clothes-dumping. Genius.
There’s the stackable laundry box – brilliant idea. Either use it for sorting types of laundry, or for different people at a central collection point – ace for large households like ours.
The portable laundry bags aren’t so practical for me and my 6-person laundry mountain, but will be fab when son No.1 heads off to Uni next year – I’ve already bookmarked it.
And the hanging laundry bag has a million uses, not just for storing the stinky smalls when you’re short on floor space.
And not a single wicker stick in sight.
So now I’m all of a flummox. But I do keep going back to those new stackable Laundry Box with the neat flip out chute. The sturdy boxes have a lid on top too, making it easy to throw laundry in and importantly take it out again. And at under £25 they’re a bit of a no-brainer…
20 October 2016
Another addition for my garden – potatoes in an old laundry basket. One basket supposedly yields 8 – 10 lbs of potates. Now that is worth a try!