Wait til they discover you can buy a bunch of the same socks and just toss them in a drawer instead of matching/folding them.
Folded socks are the worst, they always end up stretched out.
Fast drying and slow drying baby - shirts, socks, underwear, anything with a lighter fabric that will dry quickly. Other load is towels, jeans, flannels, any heavy fabric that holds a lot of water
This. I do it by the weight of the fabric itself. Towels blankets jeans all go together cause they take WAY more time to dry. Lighter things like tshirts and undergarments and things go together cause they would roast in the dryer with the thicker materials. It also evens out the weighted distribution on the washer barrel.
If you know your stuff won’t be bleeding, there’s no reason to do it by color and to protect the fabric and machines, you should do it by the fabric material itself.
Newer cleaners don’t cause the dye to bleed out.
Brand new clothes, for me, are just washed separately for that reason.
I do… I didn’t used to but I had enough white shirts turn greyish blue that I started
This right here. And thank god because I’m old enough I should still be separating colors. I for one appreciate how far we’ve come in the clothes making process that it’s not so important anymore.
Now I just gotta figure out this wool thing xD
I don’t but I’ve have a few pairs of socks turn blue so maybe it’s a good idea 🤷♀️
I think that the issue was not color transfer from colored clothes, but rather that you can use bleach on the whites. You don’t want to bleach the colored clothes.
I don’t bleach whites because I don’t care about having pure white whites, but…
googles
https://www.homesandgardens.com/kitchens/how-to-use-bleach-in-laundry
How to use bleach in laundry – expert tips for the whitest whites
These expert tips on how to use bleach in laundry will get your whites gleaming
I (50M) did this religiously until my wife disabused me of the notion that it was necessary to prevent ruining your clothes. This was only within the last ten years.
I’m not trying to hold my wife up as some generational spanning genius or anything. She is (by her own admission) very, very lazy. Separating clothes into colors is too much work.
In my fifties, I’ve never separated by color. Only by temperature.
I’m picturing some dude with a kitchen probe thermometer, carefully stabbing a shirt to determine which washing pile it goes into.
These are all room temperature again!
I do, got a light shirt stained blue and my underwear pink once…
My aunt still does separate loads for reds+yellows and blues+greens. Boomers don’t know dyes and detergents have come a long way in the last few decades.
That’s what I thought and then I ran my wife’s blue jeans with some white towels and now they are baby blue towels. On the plus side I won’t be asked to help with laundry for a long time.
Brand new jeans are just about the only exception. I just make sure to do an only black+blue wash when I get some new jeans.
Oh no these were at least a year or two old, that’s why I thought it was perfectly fine.
I only split between stuff that can’t go in the dryer (mainly printed t-shirts and an occadional button down shirt) and stuff that can (everything else)
wait, i thought it was crucial to divide laundry so you don’t mix white stuff with all the other colors? won’t your white socks turn gray if you mix them with black?
You don’t want to be throwing brand new blue jeans in with whites. They tend to bleed colour a little bit on first wash.
I haven’t had an issue with anything else in, uh, 20 years?
I now split laundry into socks/underwear and everything else, mostly because I’m tired of those items filtering down to the bottom of the basket while I’m too lazy to put my laundry away.
this changes everything! thank you. i’ll keep in mind that new stuff can bleed color
Unless something is brand new (which should get its own like-color wash to knock out any loose dyes), wash on cold water and you’ll be fine tbh. If your whites start to get a little dingy then you could do a separate whites bleach wash every once in a while. But honestly I don’t have enough clothes to be separating them, it would result in very small laundry loads which feel like a waste of time and resources (water, energy, etc).
well damn, this is news to me! thanks man, i’ll be experimenting with it next time i do laundry.
very small laundry loads which feel like a waste of resources
absolutely! i’m kind of a sucker for having a wide selection of stuff to wear, so my laundry piles tend to end up pretty large and eco-friendly once i finally run out of fresh stuff
Nope, not really
why do I care about socks. I just wear grey socks.
I do have a couple of shite shirts I do wash separately but most of the time I ensure I get clothes that don’t matter.
Im over 40 and did not. I had this simple solution. Big duffel bag. All soiled clothes go in duffel bag. Laundry day all soiled clothes go into wash. Invert duffel bag and place in wash. Wash. Move everything to drier. Dry. Invert duffel bag back to normal and all clean clothes go in duffel bag. Anyway I got married and this was the first habit changed by my wife. Now I use a 3 bag clothes hamper and seperate.
My fiance does this. I’m 38, she’s 32. It sortof baffles me.
When I was single and had fewer clothes I only separated when washing new clothes to avoid bleeding colors. After being washed once I didn’t care and never ran into issues.
Now they are separated because it makes sorting easier as most socks are in the light/white load and don’t get spread out across multiple loads. Reduces mismatches.
Towels are separate for the same reason, just easier to manage a bunch of towels than mixed clothes and towels.
