Laundry. It’s boring. We all have it. We all do it. Some of us love it. Some of us hate it. But the fact is: it’s there and it’s not going away. But I’m here to help because, laundry? Well, I have laundry down to a science. Sort of. I started doing my own laundry when I was around 10 years old, and since then, I’ve learned some tricks that help me get it done faster, get my clothes cleaner, and get most stains out. (I still regret letting my son dye Easter Eggs in his Disneyland shirt.) 

But I digress. I’ve been doing laundry for 20-mumble years, and I wanted to share with you what items, under $20, make my laundry game quicker, easier, and, well…almost fun?

What Makes Doing Laundry Easier For Me

• Shout Color Catchers Game. Changer. I sort my laundry by brights and whites, heavy fabrics, sheets, and towels. Just in case something decides to bleed all over my whites, or a red shirt decides it just has to remind me it’s there in the brights, I toss one of these in my wash. They catch loose dye in the wash…I don’t know how they work but they are magic and worth every cent I spend on a box. Your washed-with-a-red-shirt whites will thank you.
• Delicates bags But for socks! Hear me out. Kid socks are SMALL. I can’t tell you how many half pairs of newborn socks I had floating around my house before I started putting them into a delicates bag right after they came off my son’s feet. I don’t use this trick now as much as I could, but it slows down the sock-eating dryer issue that everyone seems to have, and makes pairing socks a breeze.
  
• Wool (Or Any) Dryer Balls I seldom use fabric softener. My son had eczema as a baby and softener aggravated it, so I started using nubby dryer balls from Target. My clothes had some more static but came out just as fluffy. When I switched to using wool balls this spring, I noticed a bonus: my towels, sheets, and blankets all dry faster. I’ve been told this is because the wool balls help by absorbing some of the moisture in the dryer. If you can’t use wool and use the nubby dryer balls, you can achieve the same effect by throwing a dry hand towel in with your wet clothes. 
• Carbona stain devils For around $2.50, you, too, can get ink from a pen that exploded in the dryer out of your clothes. I love these specialized stain removers for so many reasons, but the big one is that they’re specialized and they work. I recently had to get an ink stain off of a pair of my shorts and a little of the Carbona for ink plus some dabbing (sadly, not meme-able dabbing) got the ink out of my shorts quick as can be! These little bottles of stain remover pack a powerful punch and they have varieties for everything from grease to ink, blood to grass.

While these may not make you sprint to the laundry room, I hope these few laundry items help make your next few loads a little easier. What are some of your favorite laundry products?