[Basil Ransom]

Laundry. No one likes doing it. It costs money and time, and depending on your lifestyle, it can be a logistical challenge. Modern deodorant is mostly a sham, so I wonder how much of doing laundry is necessary and beneficial, especially given how sanitized modern surroundings are; we're not emptying chamber pots into the street every morning. How do you get away with doing less of it? This is more of a discussion thread than a data sheet drop.

* Wear shoes without socks. Not viable for every kind of foot, shoe or climate, but can look chic and feel great. People who tell you going sockless makes your shoes smell have never done it, ignore them. When you want to keep your body from sweating, you don't sheath it in warm layers, you wear less. Your feet aren't any different. Savings: no daily accumulation of dirty socks.

*Pants - not laundering them unless dirty/stained. Raw denim jeans are best minimally or never washed. Wool trousers also keep well without being washed. Cotton is more problematic, possibly because it's a plant, and plants have evolved to trap moisture. Some people report going commando in raw denim successfully.

* Avoiding the dryer - dryers will beat up your clothing and increase wear and tear on them. I'd recommend air drying your pricier clothing. I mostly use the dryer for the cheap stuff - socks, underwear and tees.

*Superfine Merino Wool. This is what made me suddenly interested in this topic. Wool naturally wicks away moisture and odors, and wrinkles much less than cotton. Historically, wool was itchy and thus potentially unpleasant against bare skin, but of late, superfine merino wool products have come on the market, that are soft against the skin supposedly. The only downside is that it's pricey. There was a kickstarter for a company, Wool and Prince, making these, and their founder supposedly wore the same wool shirt for 100 days and it stayed clean and odorless. Their dress shirts are $128 a pop, but there are other makers too (for at least as much money ). Anyone with personal experience, chime in.

Could be an interesting style exercise to economize on clothing and distinguish your day to day outfits with small bright accessories.

You can still find itchy wool shirts for less - look for Pendletons (the founder of Wool and Prince is from the family that owns Pendletons).

[roberto]

Merino socks are great, comfortable workwear for me, but get sweaty and smelly just like any other sock. Another benefit of wool is that is much more resistant to fire than polyester.

Baking soda! If I didn't work with oily machinery every day my shirts wouldn't need washing every day.

Over here in Britain, 'pants' means underwear. My first thought upon reading the opening line of your third paragraph was 'you filthy bastard'

[Yeti]

Basil, this does not directly answer your question but if you are worried about time, just drop off your goods at a laundromat and have someone else do it for you. You will spend maybe ten minutes per visit doing your laundry.

[Basil Ransom]

Nah, I don't like farming out my errands, for philosophical and economic reasons. Plus it means more hauling stuff around.

Roberto, just got some merino socks for a certain workout, will see how they hold up. I'm guessing it depends on how much you sweat.

[Moreless]

-Obtain work from home job
-Wear same clothes everyday
-Less laundry

For advanced:
Wear undershirts and pajama bottoms.
Note: It doesn't matter if they are ruined in the wash or dryer because they are cheap and replaceable.

[Checkmat]

Re-use towels after showering 2-3 times before washing. They're bulky and take up a lot of room in the washing machine.

Put in a load of laundry when I KNOW I'm already going to be around for a couple of hours. IE before big meal preparation for the week, doing study/office/work stuff from home.

As someone else said, do wash-and-fold service. I had to do this when I lived in NY because my building didn't have washing machines. I could have gone and done it myself at the laundromat but damn, that's a big chunk out of your day, somewhere miserable.

[Hannibal]

Supposedly, you can put your jeans in a large ziplock bag and throw it in the freezer for a week.

I've never done this, it sounds disgusting, but apparently there are lots of people who do this with their expensive jeans whenever they "feel dirty".

I do not recommend doing it for work jeans.

[Yeti]

For towels I actually go a week without switching to a new one. The catch is that I don't dry my face with the towel, only my body, as I don't want my face to be smothered with a used towel.

So far I have seen nothing wrong with this. I don't smell. I could probably go a couple weeks or more using the same towel. They take up a lot of space in the wash.

I drop off my laundry and have someone else do it. It costs about $10 per week. I respect your philosophical stance on refusing to have someone do your errands. Economically I think that you are on shaky ground, considering that it probably requires half an hour at least of your attention to do the wash (assuming perfect efficiency when you're waiting around by listening to podcasts or reading a book or something) and assuming also that you are worth more than $20/hour.

[Basil Ransom]

I have a washer/dryer in my home, so the time expenditure is fairly small.

As for the philosophical part - a digression - it's funny to me how many progressives are all for 'equality,' and then they proceed to create and sustain a feudal serf/slave economy with an army of personal helpers paid a pittance. There was a great vid posted on here of a French philosopher saying how feminism was co-opted by corporatist capitalism, that inherently reversed the Marxist struggle by requiring the careerist feminist to enlist the poor as her personal servants - and keep those servants from tending their own family.

[Drazen]

I buy a lot of underwear and socks (I've been favoring Uniqlo for both lately). When I run out or nearing running out, then its time to do laundry. I do laundry once every 2-3 weeks, usually on a night where I have nothing else to do. Most shirts I wear 2-3 times before throwing them in the laundry basket, its usually a visual/smell test. The armpits are the biggest problems usually. I wear jeans a ton before having to wash them.

[aguasin]

I have read that wearing Jeans and putting them in the freezer every night after wearing them is the way to go. (Read an article on GQ a few years ago regarding this - reduces wear on Jeans and also kills bacteria as said by the author)

[Drazen]

(03-07-2015 02:07 AM)aguasin Wrote:  

I have read that wearing Jeans and putting them in the freezer every night after wearing them is the way to go. (Read an article on GQ a few years ago regarding this - reduces wear on Jeans and also kills bacteria as said by the author)

The real purpose of this is to "break in" raw denim. The raw denim has no fading when you buy it, the more you abuse it and never wash it, the better the final product will be when you do wash it. You get certain creases, lines, etc that fit to what your lifestyle is. Its kind of a hobby for many and putting the jeans in the freezer is a way to deodorize them.

I went about 8 months of pretty frequent wear before washing my raw denim for the first time. And its not even a wash, the first few times you're supposed to just soak it in woolite black and water in the tub. The point is to keep the dyes in there as much as possible to absorb as much dirt, abuse, creases, stacking, etc as possible.

You're not supposed to do it everynight, just whenever they start to smell bad. I also leave them out on my balcony overnight sometimes.

[Basil Ransom]

Wearing jeans on end is a non-issue - ask McQueen: http://www.nationalpost.com/m/wp/blog.ht...east-study

[Aliblahba]

You shouldn't be doing any laundry if you got a girlfriend.

[Parlay44]

Is it so hard to do laundry one day a week? Geez just dump the hamper into the laundry basket and fill up a washer or two. Watch tv or do a few sets of weights for the 40 minutes it's washing. Throw the clothes in the dryer and do a few more sets. It's 2 hours out of your life and it's not like you have to sit there and watch the machine spin.

[Brian Shima]

Shoes with no socks, I hope there are no girls around when you take them bad boys off

[Nascimento]

I wash my jeans roughly once every six months. And that's because I feel I should, not because they need the wash.

[Yeti]

A lot of us don't have the space for a washer and dryer at home.

Even if I could, I don't want so much of my mental energy being taken up by mindless tasks. I feel stupider after doing laundry, like my soul needs repairing. In a way that I do not after cooking, for example.

I just don't want to deal with laundry. Support someone else's job by handing it off - they do a better job anyway and the clothes end up looking better (less wrinkles).

Like I said, I respect wanting to do your own laundry but I don't think that it's really a bad thing to pay someone. It saves time but also buys mental freedom that we can leverage to further our world domination.

[Aliblahba]

(03-07-2015 03:19 PM)Nascimento Wrote:  

I wash my jeans roughly once every six months. And that's because I feel I should, not because they need the wash.

Has your jeans ever seen blood, sweat, and tears? I have. You wash the days issues out but the denim remains.

[DJ-Matt]

You can let a towel go for longer than that, my shower dry-off towel is thick egyption cotton and I cannot remember last time it was switched but it has been at least 3 weeks. Still smells and works the same. I hang it fully out to dry after each use.

[PhDre]

(03-06-2015 09:01 PM)Yeti Wrote:  

I drop off my laundry and have someone else do it. It costs about $10 per week. I respect your philosophical stance on refusing to have someone do your errands. Economically I think that you are on shaky ground, considering that it probably requires half an hour at least of your attention to do the wash (assuming perfect efficiency when you're waiting around by listening to podcasts or reading a book or something) and assuming also that you are worth more than $20/hour.

This is a line of thought I see quite often over here. However, I think that you make a lot of assumptions in your economic argument.

1) This only works when you're self employed. If you're an employee, it doesn't matter whether you work the required 40 hours a week or put in 70 hours a week. Your boss won't pay you more.

2) If you're self employed, you should have a sufficient amount of work in the pipeline. You can't work 70 hours a week when you only have enough work/customers for 40 hours.

3) When you pay someone else to do your errands, you also pay these people's income tax, social security contributions and value added tax.

As such, from an economic point of view, it only makes sense to have someone else do your errands when you are self employed, have a well filled order book, and can charge at least two times the hourly wage of the errand boy.

That being said, cleaning and doing laundry does suck and I can completely understand that people want to outsource these tasks.

[Yeti]

Dre:

In the long run I see everything that I do as self-employment. When I am not on the clock I still do things that increase my professional worth, like reading about finance, my field, or meeting new people. Any mental energy that I exert on the soul-destroying activity of doing laundry only detracts from self-improvement, meaning that I will have less of a shot at future lucrative positions should I decide to continue being employed by someone else (which I probably will for the time being).

Essentially I see myself as being self-employed, contracting myself out to the highest bidder. When not performing my required contractual obligations, I will want to spend my time on lucrative endeavors which increase my bargaining power for future jobs.

[PhDre]

Yeti, thanks for the clarification. That is an interesting approach to work and career development which I didn't consider.

Were you always able to constantly focus your mental energy or did you train this? I ask this because I am mentally drained when I come home from work. I still have plenty of energy to work out, cook, clean, meet friends,... but I cannot focus anymore, so reading, learning new skills or working on a side business are out of the question.

To stay on topic, I do two things to limit my laundry:
1) I always wear undershirts with short sleeves, except in summer. This makes my t-shirts and shirts last a couple of days instead of only one.
2) I cycle jeans, shirts, sweaters. After wearing them for one day, I let them rest on a cloth hanger for a couple of days. Even better if you can hang them outside. Obviously, undershirts, boxer briefs and socks go to the laundry after one day of wear.

[GlockTrigga]

(03-09-2015 12:11 PM)PhDre Wrote:  

1) I always wear undershirts with short sleeves, except in summer. This makes my t-shirts and shirts last a couple of days instead of only one.
2) I cycle jeans, shirts, sweaters. After wearing them for one day, I let them rest on a cloth hanger for a couple of days. Even better if you can hang them outside. Obviously, undershirts, boxer briefs and socks go to the laundry after one day of wear.

This.

Also if you exfoliate your skin (especially the back of your neck) you can get away with not washing dress shirts more than every OTHER week as long as they don't get too wrinkly. I can't even get mines in the dry cleaner because they all close at like 6pm which is one hour before I get home every night. If you wear Khakis or dress pants to work then you don't need to wash them every week unless it's rain/snow outside. Jeans are easier because you don't have to wash them but twice a year maybe unless you get sleet or dirt on them.