Organize It: Sorting Socks

If you may remember, laundry is NOT one of the areas I excel at. It's probably the first thing my husband would think of if you asked him what I need to improve on as a homemaker. This is because, although I wash it, it takes me f.o.r.e.v.e.r to fold it and once it's folded, it again takes me f.o.r.e.v.e.r to actually put our laundry away.

Okay, confession time is over. Now I'll give you a simple tip that may help you not spend so much time folding your laundry, especially if you have a bigger family.

If you're like most people, you have about 17 different types of socks in YOUR sock drawer alone. That's not counting the 12 different types of socks in each of your husband, son or daughter's drawers. It takes a long time to pair up all of those different types of socks. Not to mention, how often does one of the socks of a pair go missing. Then you're left with an individual, lonely sock to put somewhere. Does it go back in the drawer hoping to find it's mate eventually? Do you toss it in the trash only to find the pair tomorrow? Or do you have a lost sock bin taking up space in your house with an unknown number of socks waiting to find their match? What happens if one of your socks gets a hole in it? Do you find the time to actually sit down and mend the sock with the hole or do both socks in that pair get thrown away?

Let me give you a little suggestion. Start over on your sock drawer. If you and your husband can wear similar sized socks and styles, get rid of all of the assorted socks in your drawer and head to Wal-Mart, Target or some other chain store that will carry the same brand socks indefinitely. Purchase a few packs of the SAME style sock that you can eventually go back and buy more of when you need replacements. This works for kid socks as well as long as your children have similar sized feet. Can you imagine only having to sort socks into two or three piles? If a sock gets a hole in it, throw it out and you only have one sock left over to put in your sock drawer. You should, at any given time, only have one unmatched sock in any given person's drawer. If you throw another holey sock away or lose one, wallah, now you have a matched pair.

I can't tell you how much simpler this system has made sock sorting in my household. Okay, I have to admit that my husband is a sock snob. Even though we both could wear the same socks, he refuses to share socks with me. So, I sort our socks into two piles and at any given time may have one unpaired sock in each of our drawers. Amazingly enough, our socks almost always have a pair.

Tip: I do keep a separate bin with dark socks to wear with dress shoes. Again though, I try to stick mainly to one type of dark sock so as to make my laundry sorting time a bit shorter than it would otherwise be.

Give it a whirl. You might find that it really will save you time and effort if you have the same type of socks in your laundry. What does your sock situation look like right now? Are you willing to give this method a try?