The next time you feel like your life is hard, stop and think about Michelle Duggar.
Michelle is the mother of 19 kids, so can you imagine the organisational chaos she must deal with on a daily basis?
When it comes to keeping all the clothes organised, the Duggar family has a unique system that might give you some ideas for your own home.
The Duggars keep all of the family’s clothes in one place – right beside the washing machine where it’s easy to reach. When someone needs clothes for the day, they can just go pick it off the rack and take it with them. A laundry chute allows the kids to toss all their dirties right down into the same area for washing.
Next to the washer, they keep 11 racks that have the clothes for the entire family – all 21 of them! When Michelle starts to see the space on that rack gets tight, they go through everything and sort through the old clothes. You can imagine what hand-me-downs must be like!
Whatever is too old or the wrong size for any child gets tossed or donated, and new clothes come in to replace them. It’s like an ecosystem of laundry, and all of it is managed by one woman… with a little help.
Michelle Duggar says that her daughter Jinger has taken over a lot of the duties and can instantly pinpoint what belongs to which child. I can barely do that with my two kids, so I can’t even imagine how it would work with more than 9 times that many!
What affected me most about the story was just how ingenious the whole system is. Rather than keeping every person’s clothes in a separate area – which would be nearly impossible to keep track of – they centralised everything to bring it all to the place, which, when you think about it, makes the most sense – the laundry area.
So next time you’re getting behind with the laundry, try to think of another system that might work for your family. Just because everybody else keeps their clothes in their room doesn’t mean it’s the most efficient way to do it.
To read more about the Duggar family, click here!
