Sometimes I am a lazy bitch take shortcuts. Some of those shortcuts drive my husband nuts.
- Refusing to use a laundry bin. I really have no idea why I am the way that I am. Is using a bin simpler, and more sanitary? Indeed it is. Do we have laundry bins, in our home, available for my use? Why, yes, yes we do. And still, I persist in loading my arms up with as much laundry as I possibly can hold and lugging the pile all the way across the house, dripping socks and tripping over the cat as I go.
- Washing the sheets without their little holder. My husband, weary of our bed linens turning into a wet-in-the-middle sheet burrito each time we washed them, bought a handy little tool to keep the sheets and comforter from eating each other. They work GREAT. But I find it less convenient to attach them to the sheets than to simply deal with the sheet burrito. This may be the thing that tips my husband over the edge, hard to say.
- Only doing half the towel replacement job. We have hand towels under our kitchen sink. Often, when I think to toss them in the laundry, I am doing fifteen other things and I forget, for a while, to replace them with new towels. The most frequent catalyst for remembering? My husband washes his hands and yelps, “There’s no towel!”
- Letting damp dishes air dry. Our dishwasher has a drying function, but still, sometimes the clean dishes have a little moisture on them. Mug bottoms, of course. How else do you know that the dishes are done if there isn’t a little crescent of water in the bottom of your mug? (This is how! My husband isn’t the only one with handy little tools.) The other primary culprit is the plastic lids of our food storage containers, but sometimes a pot or a strainer or a plastic cup will have a little beading of water. My husband removes each of these from the dishwasher separately, dries them on the dish towel that I have of course completely remembered to replace, and only once they are completely dry does he put them away. Not me. I give a little shake then toss ‘em in whatever drawer or cupboard they belong. Literally nothing bad has ever happened from taking this little shortcut.
- Not removing the lint after each load. Oh, good, we’re back in the laundry room. Why do I have so many laundry-related shortcuts? I DON’T IRON, EITHER. Okay, before you leap to the comments to warn me about dryer fires – my nightmare, seriously – I will assure you that I always, always clean the lint trap before I dry a load of laundry. I just do it before I dry things, rather than after. Sure, this sometimes mean my husband or child are cleaning out MY lint (although I do their laundry, too), but since I do the majority of the laundry in our household, I’m okay with that.
Turnabout, as they say, is fair play. Members of my family are not immune to laziness cutting corners. Here are a few of the things they do that drive me nuts.
- Leaving dishes “to soak.” Listen. LISTEN. I get it. Sometimes a dish benefits from a good soak in soapy water. (Although Dawn Powerwash cuts the soak time to five minutes, even for the most stuck-on grease and grime! I would accept any and all sponsorships, I love you, Dawn Powerwash!) But that dish should not be there the next day. Soaking returns diminish after about thirty minutes. Once in a great while, an overnight soak does seem to do the trick for a particularly obnoxious dish. But that is RARE and does not apply to, say, a bowl of oatmeal or a plate of melted marshmallow crust.
- Walking around a thing as though it were invisible. Things assemble, detritus collects. That’s just a part of being a modern human, I suppose. But things should not live forever in a location that should be temporary. A sweatshirt’s home is not on a kitchen barstool. A pair of discarded socks does not make pleasing decor for the couch. The laundry room counter is not the perfect spot for an empty takeout cup to take up residence. I am not immune to letting something sit for a good long while. I’ve had a giant Hefty bag full of Clothes to Donate on the floor of my office for weeks now because I want to take it to the place where I volunteer, but I haven’t volunteered there in a while and I feel guilty and I haven’t been able to come up with a couple of hours to go volunteer and also the place is realllllly out of the way so it’s not simple to just drop it off, so I just yesterday tucked the bag behind my office door so I don’t have to see its accusatory mug anymore. But when the effort required to deal with a thing is, like, throwing it in the trash or moving it into one’s bedroom? JUST DEAL WITH THE THING.
- Waiting to clean one’s beverage vessel. We all have our stainless steel coffee/tea mugs and our reusable water bottles and we use them. But when they need to be cleaned, they somehow end up congregating on my kitchen counters for days until the cleaning can be ignored no longer. Stanley carafes are not my idea of an appropriate knickknack.
Okay, your turn. Which of these shortcuts do you find most egregious? Also: I know you have shortcuts; time to spill.
Aw yiss! I have beef with two of your shortcuts, so we can have a fun discussion. Both your husband’s and your approach to handling wet dishes bug me. It’s impossible (at least IMO) to dry something that has a lot of nooks and crannies by hand. It’s also a big no for me to put away anything that isn’t bone dry. In my house, things like this sit in the dish drainer until they get air dry. That of course led to another family feud issue, which was not checking if things were dry before throwing more wet dishes in the dish drainer, but that’s a story for another day.
Also, never have I ever left lint in the dryer! Even if I have to remove it while juggling a load of clothes that I couldn’t be bothered to put in the laundry bin. I’m with you 100% there!
However, since you are the family dumping ground for having to clean everyone else’s water bottles, you are allowed to take all of the shortcuts that you want. Let me know if you need me to tell your family this directly.
Okay, Birchie. I respect and admire you. WHAT is the necessity for being bone dry?! My husband’s argument is mildew, which is fair, but our dishes either complete their air drying in the cupboard or drawer where the live or they are used too soon for any mildew to take root.
Putting wet dishes on top of dry dishes in the dish drainer is madness. MADNESS.
Wait. Wait. WAIT. BACK IT UP A MOMENT BEEP BEEP BEEP
What is this magical tool that keeps the fitted sheet from eating the rest of the laundry???
I HATE drying dishes and I will do anything to not do that, including loading up the dishrack dangerously. I would rather put dishes away wet than dry them. It’s a holdover from my childhood when I had to dry the dishes and the tea towel would get soggier and soggier, but for some reason I couldn’t just get a NEW TEA TOWEL, I had to use the cold and soggy one…and my brother never had any kitchen related chores, so I resented it deeply!
LOL, love the George reference.
It is kind of a magical tool, Nicole. I acknowledge this. And also I can’t be bothered. (See above re: lazy bitch.)
YES, a soggy tea towel is a nightmare.
Also, your brother never had kitchen chores?!?!?! The unfairness! Come to think of it, my brother never had any kitchen chores either! Did he have ANY chores???? (Probably. He lived at home for six years after I went away to college, so perhaps he inherited all my old chores.)
I’m with Nicole. What is this magical tool that keeps the sheets from mangling up like a giant, wet burrito???
Also with Nicole… my parents are VERY anti air-dry (even though it’s 1000x more hygienic), and I also grew up wiping dishes with a wetter and wetter dish towel and also wasn’t allowed to get a fresh one when it was wet.
I am a hard pass on drying anything by hand if I can avoid it, so I am a drip-dry. Anything that comes out of the dishwasher that isn’t fully dry, goes into our drainer beside the sink to finish air drying.
I clean out the lint trap every 2 dry cycles, probably. And I think I’m the only one who does it. I should do it each time.
My husband complains that if something isn’t nailed down I will put it in the dishwasher. My daughter even labeled her go-to cup with a sign to NOT take it and wash it.
I’m sure I could come up with all sorts of shortcuts I take and/or that my family takes that bug me but I’m coming up empty thinking on the spot…
TRY THE MAGICAL TOOL, ELISABETH!!!
Why did our parents all torture us with the wet tea towel??? Was there a tea towel shortage in the 90s???
YESSSSSS. I also put everything in the dishwasher! I would 100% rather dishwash anything than wash it by hand.
We have a laundry chute in the bathroom. Theoretically, everyone puts clothes down it, where they land in the basket in the laundry room. But Noah often lets his dirty clothes accumulate on his bedroom floor. And when (in the interest of having a predictable amount of laundry to do on laundry days) I pick it up off his floor, I do the same as you do and carry the huge pile to the chute in my arms, rather than using one of several laundry baskets we own. Why? I think it’s because I think of the baskets as being for carrying clean, wet laundry from the washer outside to the line (and then back inside) or for transporting clean, dry laundry from the dryer upstairs, and not for transporting dirty laundry.
Steph, I am with you 100% on not transporting dirty laundry in the clean laundry bin. The thing that makes this worse on my end is that I have a designated laundry bin for dirty clothes and a separate one for clean clothes! Must be hubris that drives me to do this, week after week.
Ugh a lot of these make me kind of annoyed with your husband. Like, hey dude, check for a towel before you wash your hands **shrug**
I definitely empty the dishwasher with a towel in hand and dry most things to put them away. But I always put plastic containers (I try not to dishwasher these, but sometimes it happens) and bento boxes in the drying rack because it;s hard to get them dry with a towel, and I hate pulling them out of the cupboard damp.
I don’t have the sheet issue, but I generally only wash sheets with themselves and maybe a blanket and duvet cover, so I dry them extra long anyway?
I am forever dragging piles of laundry through the house in my arms and dropping socks. Why am this way? who knows.
The worst part is when you FORGET one of the dropped socks. Then you have a partnerless sock and it throws off everything!
Everyone has drying racks! I need to do a separate post about this because I don’t know HOW a drying rack would work in my house.
I also carry the laundry around in my arms, losing things as I go, which is weird since I have at least six baskets that could be used at any time.
I use dryer balls to help avoid the sheet burrito. They don’t always work, but mostly.
We let our pots and pans air-dry on the counter after hand washing them. I’ll admit, sometimes it takes me an entire day before I put them away, which is strange because I love not having them on the countertop. Clean counters for the win!
Our dryer balls just climb inside the sheet burrito and take a nap, Suz.
YES, clean and clutter free counters are the dream!
No laundry basket here, either and I take out the lint before drying, not after. It all goes in the dishwasher and I don’t meticulously dry the mug bottoms but maybe run a paper towel around them after I shake them off. Not fully, you understand. Just enough so they will dry up.
I hear you on the invisible anything that no one but me seems to see!
YES! You and I clearly do laundry the correct way, LOL.
OMG the kids putting food storage/lunch box containers away wet drives me crazy. There is nothing worse than opening a container while packing lunch, and finding it still wet, or worse, black scuzzy mold inside because it was put away wet. Then I have to wash or dry it anyway before I can put the lunch things in it Well, maybe famine and war is worse. BUT….. it is still oodles of annoying.
I’m sorry – does that magical tool take less time to put on than just actually un balling the sheets? I dunno – I’m of the “shove the laundry in the machine, add soap, press start” school. I can’t imagine adding one more step.
I feel like my biggest shortcut is hiring bi-weekly cleaners…
Okay, your point about black scuzzy mold in a lunch container has me rethinking all my life choices, Diane! And yes, I do believe the magical tool takes some time. It also hurts my fingers, but that is because I am a Wuss.
I’m with you on many of the laundry laziness: no ironing, no clothes basket (mine is for storage-haha) and no cleaning the lint trap every time. My parents would warn me strongly about that last one.
Ironing is the worst. Not worth it AT ALL.
Well you just influenced me to purchase the sheet tool to prevent the laundry burrito. That is a MAJOR PET PEEVE in our house and something Phil and I both gripe about. I thought I had heard about a solution so I could not click buy fast enough when you linked to the gadget.
I cannot believe you don’t use laundry baskets!!! Ahhhhhh!!! We do such huge loads of laundry as we typically only do 2-3 loads/week. Sometimes the laundry barely fits in our laundry basket (we only have one since we don’t do enough laundry to necessitate more than one laundry basket). There’s NO WAY I could carry the laundry upstairs without a basket. It would be horrible!
My husband would probably tell you that I can be a bit clutter blind at times. I will put up with clutter and messes for a good amount of time and then I go on a cleaning spree. He is tidier than I am but I feel like I have a lot on my mind so the mental load blocks things out for me a bit? Or there are problems we have that I’d like to buy a gadget for but he doesn’t want to. Like crumbs. We have so many crumbs in our house. I want to buy this little floor vacuum that has a rechargeable battery so I can zip around and quickly vacuum up crumbs. My parents have one and I love it and I actually enjoy vacuuming with it. Phil is against this purchase and wants to use a broom and dust pan WHICH IS THE WORST.
I hope that you and Phil like the magical tool!
My husband cannot believe the laundry basket thing either, LOL. It is harder, to carry all the loose laundry. I don’t know why I find it so hard to put the laundry in a basket.
A broom and dustpan?!?! Why, Phil?!
HUH. Who knew there was such a tool? No more tangled sheets??? I must have this.
I take plenty of shortcuts. PLENTY. I don’t sort my laundry (everything gets washed together on cold, tough luck whites) and I don’t iron. I don’t even know where my iron is. BUT. The rest of my family operates on the belief that “if I leave this here long enough, SOMEONE ELSE will take care of it.” I’ve tried ignoring these things (two can play at that game) but eventually it becomes clear that no one else is going to pick up the trash from the middle of the living room (or whatever else is wrong, you can probably imagine) so I just do it. Grr.
If you get the sheets tool, you have to let me know how you like it!
The “if I leave this here long enough thing” is enough to send me screaming into the sea. I have performed some social experiments, and even though I was the only one aware of these experiments, I still ended up being the one to cave first. SIGH.
Ever since discovering the Finnish kitchen with the cupboard draining board over the sink, I have wanted one!
I don’t use a dryer, but that detangling took thingy sounds marvelous. I do solve the ‘missing’ towel situation by only having 2 of each (except teatowels, I have 20-odd of them!). Of course, living alone, I don’t even think about my ‘shortcuts’. I will now, though.
Hahaha — I think shortcuts, when they don’t impact anyone else, are just The Perfect Way!
Like you, I drag both clean and dirty clothes through the house rather than lug around a laundry basket. Now, to be fair, I usually wash clothes every day – so the loads are smaller and more manageable to carry. But actually, that is my short cut (doing laundry just about every day) because I HATE folding clothes; this way I only have a few to fold at a time.
Also like you, I just chuck whatever from the dishwasher into the cabinet/drawer to let it air dry there. I don’t have the space for (or want) a dish drainer taking up counter real estate, so it is what it is.
HECK YEAH, GIGI! Chuckers unite!
Hooray for shortcuts! I clean the lint filter before drying clothes, not after. I do use laundry baskets – I have rolling ones! If something is a bit wet after the dishwasher runs, I give it a little shake into the sink and put it away. There’s zero humidity where I live, so those little drops of water don’t last long!
Woo hoo! Pre-drying lint removal FTW!
Hmm. Perhaps my husband’s and my disagreement over lid moisture is due to a difference in humidity levels of where we each grew up???
Our fancy new dishwasher has a feature where it will open at the end of the cycle do air dry that last bit, which worked great until the repair guy came to fix something else, and now it doesn’t work anymore which makes zero sense because he didn’t fiddle with the latch. I should call so it can work again.
I don’t like it when the sheets get all balled up together because the stuff on the inside doesn’t dry. Do I hate it enough to buy and remember to use a device? I doubt it.
I leave my mug on the table for hours in case I want another cup of tea. I’m sure it bugs the crap out of my husband and daughter, but they don’t say anything about it. In return I don’t say anything when they can’t properly load the dishwasher.
Julie, there is a person who visits our home who will leave a plastic Starbucks cup in varying places around my kitchen for days. It wouldn’t be so bad if the cup were reused, as intended, but I eventually. move it to a more out of the way place and there it stays, for days. Anyway. THAT is annoying, leaving a mug on the table for a few hours in case of another cup of tea is FINE.
Those sheet things are really interesting, but I will also just deal with the wad.
So last year I learned you put your mugs on the top shelf at an angle and the bottoms come out mostly dry! Crazy I didn’t learn that until my 40s. We also do not use air dry though, cause of all the plastic lids we leave out drying on the counter. There is just less water on our mugs LOL.
Kim, I want to know who has a dishwasher that allows for angled mugs?! I have to set mine flat otherwise there isn’t enough room for other dishes. And you better believe I am cramming that top rack as full as it can go (while still getting things clean).
I also have never heard of the tool that keeps your sheets from rolling up together in the washing, but I suspect I would be like you and not bother to use it. We generally put a single sheet in with the rest of our clothes and just get them washed over a few days, rather than having the two sheets rolled up in a ball, so we have the different problem of socks and undies hiding in the fitted sheet. We either line-dry (and then the things hiding in the fitted sheet don’t dry) or hang the clothes up inside and put the sheet in the dryer so the things I like to hang then go through the dryer. This is more of a problem now that G has taken over responsibility for the washing because he does not always check the fitted sheet for hidden clothes.
I also do not dry off any dishes that come out of the dishwasher a little bit wet.
My son used to call me OCD, so I called him out and said telling him to move his shoes that had been sitting under the breakfast bar for three days was not OCD. He now has a wife who is much more particular than I am and she is having much better success training him.
LOL — I’m glad your son married someone who will make him appreciate his mother!
Love this post.
I think I take all your shortcuts too. Luckily I don’t have to do laundry. I do have the wet burrito because I do the sheet washing. The time to attach such a tool is probably the same to untangle.
Yes, I think it is about the same amount of time!
I grew up handwashing; my brother grew up soaking. I swear that man never really actually washed a dish. Even now if I see him actually doing dishes I take a photo because it is like seeing a rare bird in the wild. Because of this, and living alone therefore rarely using a lot of dishes, I often handwash still. Once I had a friend over for dinner and he told me I was loading the dishwasher all wrong, despite me having lined everything up very neatly. Personally I think loaded is loaded and if I can fit a lot, I am good. Also, I am team shake and put away, even if a bit wet. If they are really wet, I will dry them with a wet tea towel and put them away, because really that is much more sanitary (eye roll!)
Yes, loaded is loaded! There are probably as many ways to load a dishwasher as there are dishes, and I’m betting 90% of them result in clean dishes, so why argue?!