Not to change the subject BUT "And before I get scolded for not just doing my OWN laundry growing up rather than leaving my poor mother to slave away at it,"

I never understood why children should be doing laundry.

#1 a young persons' job is to good in school, not housework.

#2 it is more efficient to do 1 large load of laundry for several persons rather than many small loads for each person.

Because my laundry room is 5' x 7' and the only things in it are the 2 machines plus a laundry tub I fold laundry on either the dining room or kitchen tables.

on the bed

I fold laundry in the laundry room on a counter.

Rho, I agree about children and laundry. It's not rocket science. They will learn easily enough when the time comes. Childhood comes but once, adulthood is forever ;-)

On my bed. I wanted a laundry room when I was house hunting but it didn't turn out that way. I have a laundry closet and so use my bed. I also recently bought some laundry detergent sheets to try out when my current detergent gets used up.

I fold the laundry on top of the dryer as it comes out. I then carry the piles to be put away. I also hang many items, some on outdoor clotheslines and some on hangers in the large opening overlooking the living room. i generally do laundry every day even though it is just 2 of us. We use clean towels every day.

Towels and sometimes jeans get folded right out of the dryer. It's one reason I will only own dryers with hamper doors (drop down). I don't do huge loads. It's no longer necessary since front loaders adjust the water to the load. Most everything gets folded on the bed. I like to fold and/or hang while the clothes are still warm from the dryer. Never understood people who leave the folding for later.

I think my DS was around 13 when he asked me to show him how to do laundry so he could do his own. His preference. DD was happy to not have to deal with hers until she moved on to college.

I fold my laundry on the folds, unless it is a shirt and then it goes on a hangar.

I love doing laundry. Well, I love that the machines do the hard work, I get to sort and fold, the fun stuff.

I told on the bed. Plenty of room for the stacks of fresh clothes.

I also fold on the bed, although sometimes right out of the dryer and fold on top of the washing machine. I put all of my shirts on hangers right out of the dryer. I probably have much less clothes than the average person, but I do laundry of one thing or another almost every day. Today I washed all the cat blankets.

I also fold on the bed. Our laundry is in the basement so it would be difficult to fold down there and try to bring up folded stacks of clothes. So, I lug everything up and down stairs in a basket with a handle. I hang things that need to be hung, down in the basement and go get them later when they have dried. It is just the two of us so it is only a couple of loads a week.

Straight out of the dryer, on top of the machines. Then short walk to put it away. Love our wee little downsize house!

Part of my house is a weird layout in that you walk into a foyer in front, dining room in back, and you walk through the dining room to get to a center hallway off of which is the kitchen, laundry room, stairs up, and hall to the other side of the house. Now if there’s any way you pictured that correctly, you’ve realized that the dining room is somewhat removed from the kitchen, which I love for formal sitdown meals but leaves the dining room unused much of the time. But notice that it’s very close to the laundry room. Unfortunately getting everyone to take their folded laundry from the dining table can be a challenge, so the entrance to the house can look sloppy.

I don't use the dryer. I hang my clothes on the line in the summer, or on a folding rack on the balcony all winter.

When they're dry, I bring them in and fold on the bed if I bring them in from the clothesline, or on the table, from the balcony. The balcony is off the dining area.

Clothes that need folding are done immediately as they come out of the dryer and placed on top of the machines. Socks are paired, etc. Hanging clothes are put on hangers immediately and dangle from a shelf to the side of the washer. The problem for me, is putting everything away. I can wash, dry, fold and hang three loads and for some reason that easy-peasy step of putting them away to end the task, evades me.

In the spring, summer and fall, I hang sheets and shirts outside. Shirts are on their hangers so when I bring them in they go straight to the closet.

On the bed. At our previous house it was easy to fold bedsheets by letting them hang down over the staircase railing. Current house's staircase isn't set up like that, so I have to either get DH to hold the other end and fold with me, or lay the sheets on the bed and do a lot of back & forthing to get them straight and even. I don't mind doing laundry nearly so much now that we're retired, and can each wear one set of 'easy' clothes per day.

Dining room table. I have a stacked washer and dryer in my kitchen, and it's a really small kitchen. The dining room table is only a few feet away and has windows overlooking the back yard.

On a counter at the side of the Laundry Room.

I fold on the counter in the laundry room. If its a small load of my things, I fold or hang as I reach for each item on the hamper style dryer door. I don't fold as often as I used to with DH retired, he will hear the dryer has stopped and do it for us. Either way, he usually carries the folded things back to the far end of the house to our bedroom. (it's 96 steps from bedroom to my office, suppose only about 10 less to the laundry room ;0)

I had a tiny laundry area in our smaller house - a converted back porch we'd added heat/air to. It was just a few steps to a small built in table-for-two in the small kitchen and I'd fold there. We too have a four poster canopy bed and it's just too easy to place hangers holding fresh laundry on it.

I've gone to bed with a weeks worth of my pants or tops hanging at the foot end.

Towels get folded on top of the dryer. Sheets get folded on the dining room table. All clothes, which hang dry on racks in the guest bathroom, are folded on the guest bed unless they stay on hangers to go directly into the closet. Everything gets put away immediately, but I don't have children, so the laundry isn't overwhelming.

I get a second laundry basket, and put the folded things in that, then put them away - or not 🙃

And why shouldn't kids learn basic chores and life skills? I work with school age kids and too many don't seem to know how to do anything in that regard. It can be a real headache when they won't even pick up after themselves and seem to have no clue how to - or that they should.

Chores make children feel they're contributing and part of the family/group, and will certainly prepare them for adulthood. Chores and responsibilities also help avoid creating annoyingly entitled people.

Curious how many here had chores when they were kids? We certainly did.

as they come out of dryer, except sheets which get folded on the bed.

^^^ Chores as a kid? In the 1950s?? H*ll yes! Sometimes I believed my mother hardly did anything as we kids did so much, lol. Dishes by hand, setting the table, polishing silver at holiday-time, sweeping floors with broom, food prep, yard work, weeding huge vegetable garden, washing insides of windows, washing painted woodwork, vacuuming...

Aaaand laundry. Oh, yes, fun stuff. Family of seven. 1820 farmhouse on 10 acres. Washer in room behind kitchen, no access directly to outdoors. No dryer, Clotheslines behind the house, strung between house wall and two tall posts my father put in.

So, clothes tossed down the back stairs when mum told us to, she did the washing in old cranky machine (even had an ancient wringer-washer at one time, which we were warned about not to get our hands near the roller. I suppose child services would frown upon that these days...). Wet stuff loaded into several baskets, and then lugged thru the kitchen, out the back door, across the gravel driveway, around the three-bay ell, arrive at clothesline. Hang stuff.

So much fun dealing with heavy wet sheets, especially. Summer made for unpleasant treks over burning-hot gravel (summer meant no shoes for the most part). Cold weather was worse, handling freezing wet sheets to pin up. To top off my personal misery, I am/was never taller than five feet, and the clothesline was hung for my much taller mother's convenience. Lol. The sheets in winter would be hard as boards and very unwieldy. Had to wait for them to warm up inside before folding...

THIS: >"Chores make children feel they're contributing and part of the family/group, and will certainly prepare them for adulthood. Chores and responsibilities also help avoid creating annoyingly entitled people."< Yep.

I often muse that modern laundry chores are not really any easier than heading down to the creek or town fountain and scrubbing it on rocks. At least in those times the women had the opportunity to socialize, away from menfolk and kids !!

Fold? What is this fold you speak of? Sheets go back on the bed. Hanging stuff gets hung, eventually,. Under clothes and socks get shoved in a drawer. I do have to fold kitchen towels to get them in the drawer, but that is all. That is for me. Hubby does his own.

I go to the grands house and do their wash 2 times a week. When it snowed this year I did not go for2 weeks, so mom had to do it. One of the boys asked her why his things were not turned right side out (so he could just put it on in the morn, ) and one sock was not right side out like the other one was. Her reply was cause that is how I do it, and that is why grandma comes and does the wash for you.

I have a countertop next to the dryer but it isnt as large as I would like it to be, and of course it ends up being used for other stuff that comes in from the garage. So I take it to our bed and fold, or if it’s just a few small things, I fold it from the basket in the den, set it on the coffee table, and then take to the bedroom or wherever it goes. If it’s the cleaning towels/cloths the housekeepers use, I usually fold right from the dryer and put away in the laundry room cabinet where they are stored.

I also hang a lot of things to dry on a wall-mounted hanging rack. I just grab those and take to the closet to put away.

I fold everything in the living room. I pile the folded clothes on the Chaise and sofa as I'm usually the only one in there. They then get either just carried or put in a laundry basket and carried to where they belong.

I am trying to do a load a day and also trying to do my squats every other day. Both things seem to be difficult for me to remember or make myself do so I am trying to do them in conjunction with one another. I'm not very good at connecting a chore to a new chore.

PS, I don't usually fold sheets or most towels. They go right back on the bed or towel bar.

Learning to do laundry is a necessary life skill for most of us. When I started college within a couple of months I was giving laundry lessons to friends and then their friends and so on. I had crowds. They needed to not turn their underwear pink.

When your child does laundry they do not just do their own, they do everyone's and the household laundry. How else do you learn to clean a variety of laundry items and what to not try and clean yourself. My grannie believed in teaching children house keeping skills. We all learned to sweep, dust, simple sewing, cooking, ironing and all those domestic chores including how to use an axe and sharpen a knife. You learned to put things away and look after your personal living space. You need to know these things.

The things that dont get taken right out of the dryer and hung up get dumped on the bed, folded and put away if they are mine. DH wants to fold his own clothes. Some day I assume he is actually going to do it. As it is he mostly wads them up and stuffs them in odd corners around his side of the bed and bureau. I do an intervention from time to time without comment. He got no domestic training and it shows.

What's wrong with pink underwear?????

My children are taught to keep everything neat and in place. They can lay a table for any meal and they are aware of my housekeeping standards. Should they need to clean their own houses, they will learn easily, should they outsource the task, they will know what to require.

At school, they have a laundry service, though they have noticed the folding is better at home ;-)

PS I realize I sound glib here, but truly, there are other skills which merit more attention and effort than housework in this day and age when most of these tasks are easily offloaded allowing us to earn more money performing the work for which we are trained and well compensated.

When I typed pink I could feel "what is wrong with pink" coming. Made me smile.

And who are these tasks going to be off loaded onto? I dont have a laundry service. How convenient that I do laundry? My grandmother believed that men should know the basics of taking care of themselves but no where in her universe did men actually need to do these domestic tasks. Still, as she said, you never knew.

In regarding to kids and chores.....

We did the grunt work, and of course were nagged half to death about cleaning our bedrooms.

I will never understand the neurotic obsession that parents have with a kid having a tidy bedroom. As long as its not DIRTY, with dirty dishes or anything like that, what is the problem with not being absolutely perfect all the time? I cannot figure out why people cannot just close the door and move on if the sight of a messy room disturbs them so much. It used to drive my mother NUTS if we did not make our beds before we went to school.....WHY?!?!? Now I never make the bed, except when I change the sheets. Because stuff like that DOES NOT MATTER!

My mom, as I said, enjoyed laundry, so we were not allowed near it. However, we were sent to collect it all and lug it to the laundry room and of course tasked with putting it away. My dad enjoyed loading and unloading the dishwasher. Very odd but anyway we were never forced or even taught to do the dishes. My mom also enjoyed cleaning so we were only forced to help with the big twice a year major deep cleanings. All of us keep a clean house as adults. Loading a dishwasher, laundry, sweeping, mopping, dusting, none of this is difficult. If someone needs to be taught how to sweep a floor, perhaps their loved ones should question if they should be living independently at all.

Now, the things we DID have to do, yard work. Mowing, weed eating, edging, raking leaves, hauling branches and cleaning up sticks. Any sort of outside manual labor, that is what we had to do. I remember my dad always saying that HE did not mind doing it (though I never saw him doing it ever) but WE needed to learn how to maintain a yard. (eye roll) He always said that when his youngest (me) got a job than HE would take all of it over, no problem. Well, when I was 15 I got a job and he hired a lawn service. Go figure. And now as an adult, I do not do yard or land maintenance. I garden because I like it. But the boring drudgery? My SO does it and if I am ever alone, I will hire it out, as with any task I do not like or cannot manage by myself.

Starting at age 10 I started cooking dinner for the family every night, because my mother hated cooking(still does) and I liked it. That has come in handy I think but I am of the belief that anyone can cook if they can read and understand instructions.

One of my sisters has 6 kids (my parents did too) and whenever I go to her house I cringe at the amount of nagging she does. Its like she cannot stand to see a kid relax. There is always a chore to do. I advised her that my childhood memories were dominated by nagging, from both parents. Even though one could see that we had a happy childhood. The CONSTANT nagging about stupid things like a tidy bedroom or an unmade bed, the constant riding them to do something if they had a spare second, all that in the name of preparing them to be adults. And I asked her if that's what she wants her kids to remember her for. She just told me that I do not have kids and so will never understand. She is right.

I would much rather have been taught actual maintenance. Plumbing and electrical work, some basic carpentry, simple car repairs, things like THAT might be useful and are things that usually cannot be easily figured out by oneself, like cleaning can. But, now there is YouTube and so one can learn it now!

Patriciae, My grandmother never learned to cook, though she was made to dust on Saturday mornings and learned to sew quite spectacularly. She grew up middle class and married above that. My mother learned the basics of cooking when she got married and then moved on to advanced cooking when she had grandchildren (lucky them, not so lucky me ;-)

My mother taught me to make spaghetti when I married (I learned to make schnitzel at a young age from an uncle, though.) My mother said if you can read and have motivation, you can cook (that was before YouTube.)

Next up laundry and cleaning. I have pretty strict laundry standards and my sons expect their clothes to look decent, so they will either pay for a laundry service, or learn to manage on their own. I will gladly provide lessons if needed. It's not hard at all. Lots of workplaces have laundry services baked into their campuses too.

Cleaning is about as simple as things get. You do need to stay on top of it though and you must be neat, or it's hard to clean or even hire someone to clean for you.

amylou, about the neatness issue, that is a huge buggaboo for me. Mind you, my closet was a terrible mess when I was growing up and it caused all sorts of grief with my mother. She threatened to put everything that was not properly put away in a garbage bag and send it off to Goodwill if I did not meet her deadlines. I hated dealing with my mess, but as I got older, and saw how messily some people lived, I was super grateful to have been taught the value of always maintaing your space neatly and properly. I hope my boys will have learned this lesson as well. I did not show any signs of having learned until I had my own apartment :-)

Zalco, my mother WOULD bag stuff up and donate it if it was on the floor. How that made me feel : That I was not worthy to have things if I was not perfect all the time. It was exhausting to have to worry about whether or not a left a favored toy out because as a CHILD I was distracted by other things, including important things like schoolwork or playing with siblings. When I was very small, just started school I would burst into tears in the middle of the day because I was afraid that I forget to put something away, and that she would get rid of it. Now, looking back, it was not as dramatic as is seemed when I was a child, and she wasn't a monster, but she was a NAG and as I said earlier, clouds my childhood memories. The parental nagging was just as bad as having my stuff gotten rid of....LET ME LIVE!!!!!

Adults live like they want. If they want everything neat and tidy all the time, great, do that. If clutter and messiness do not bother you, great, live like that. I suppose my gripe was the constant nagging to be up to THEIR standards, which are not mine. And I resented them always trying to push them on me. Tidy and Clean are different things, and one does not automatically mean the other. And being raised in a neat all the time house or a messy all the time house likely does not affect well adjusted adults in how they live. Our house growing up was pristine at all times, as far as being clean. Mine is not, clutter does not bother me, an unmade bed is not a character flaw, dust is not a death sentence. It does not bother me in the slightest when Leo leaves muddy pawprints on the floor mere minutes after I have mopped it. Who. Cares. People and animals live there. It will get cleaned up when it gets cleaned up. And my house is generally neat, but not always and it has nothing to do with my upbringing. I live like I want. No one really NEEDS to be taught how to be neat.

PS amylou, I try to keep the nagging to a minimum. Consequences are a more powerful tool and once you have proven your willingness to follow through on what you say, you are golden and the kiddos will do as you say. I had zero doubt my mother would give my things to Goodwill. My boys have personally turned over their belongings to the Junior League Shop.

My brother off-loaded all his housekeeping to a housekeeper for many years. When he lived nearby temporarily, such service was not immediately available but he did have in-unit machines. He called me up to walk him through doing his wash. He’s 60.

Amylou, Your post above mine only just showed up now. Your mother's standards were way stricter than my mother's. I would never allow housekeeping issues to interfere with my relationship with my children. There was general agreement about what was expected and why. There is a happy medium between allowing children to not follow any house rules and making their lives overly difficult, or traumatizing them. And you are right, neatness versus messiness will not affect their well being later in life, but for me, it is a part of what they learn courtesy of being my children, just like they learn other things that may or not be specific to our family's culture, like appreciating Queen and Wagner.

We weren't nagged. My Grannie made it all fun. She had a farm and there were all sorts of outside responsibilities as well. We enjoyed ourselves. We had plenty of time to dig to China or go fishing. When chores were done your time was entirely your own. It was not as fun at home but that wasnt the chores so much as my mother being difficult. I think there is real benefit in a child having age appropriate responsibilities in the household. Domestic skills can seem simple. Still there are efficient and non efficient ways of doing things. if you were to dust and I dont say you have to, you should sweep or vacuum before you dust. Simple logic but being told that as a kid is useful. Damp moping on the other hand comes last. You don't have to waste time figuring it out for yourself. House and yard work is full of such things.