Laundry Laundry Everywhere

Laundry was a big problem for me in what we are now calling “the burned down house” (to distinguish it from “our first house” and “the old house”).  In the not-quite-two-years we lived there I never worked out a good system for sorting, washing, and putting away like I’d had before, probably because there was no laundry room.  When Emily was home, she always took over putting the laundry away.  When she was at school, I usually let it pile up on the sofa in the living room until I had several hours to tackle it all at once.  There was a big pile there on Labor Day.
Things are much better here, I am thrilled to say.  For the first time ever, I have a laundry area upstairs near my bedroom, which is also where the little kids’ rooms are.  That makes it very easy to put two-thirds of the laundry away as it comes out of the wash.  When I fill a basket with clean things for the big boys, I take it down for them to put away–or not.
John went to our storage facility this week and brought back some boxes, including some clothes salvaged from our basement.  I also retrieved a laundry basket full of smoky clothes that I had left in one of the places where we stayed before we found this house.  Several washes later, with the help of Oxyclean, Shout, and Febreze, the fire smell is gone.
On the day we salvaged, John and I took stacks and stacks of clothes that had been in the armoire in Teddy’s room to the nearby dry cleaner.  Today he picked it up–$257 worth (it costs twice as much for the smell removal, apparently).  We were so shell-shocked that day that we paid no attention to what we were saving, so thrilled were we that anything was left at all.  So we have spent an amusing evening looking through clothes that Teddy never bothered to remove from his room even though they were too small for him to wear.  Jake can wear a few things, but Goodwill is going to be getting some nicely pressed clothes this week.
It was the same with many of the things I washed, again mostly from Teddy’s room (lifted from his floor, where he kept them, and therefore tainted with wet gray nastiness).  However, there were some happy surprises from Lorelei’s room–her bathrobe (just the other day she was missing it); a dress that was a favorite of mine when I was a little girl; another that was Emily’s.  I really don’t remember much about that day, and I thought all the clothes that were mine were gone.  So that made me happy. 🙂