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Comment by skrebbel | Hacker News Reader

At the risk of making yet another wrong assumption, that sounds like you don’t have a family?

Fwiw laundry takes a pretty significant chunk out of my weekend. I wouldn't spend “thousands of dollars” to reduce it but at around the price of a new phone I’m totally in the market.

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There are four of us. It takes me 5 minutes to gather everything up and put it in the washing machine, 3 minutes to transfer it to the dryer when it's done, and ten minutes to separate it out and drop it in the right drawers when dry. That happens 3-4 times a week. Say 60-80 minutes total per week.

I have found that in order to reduce laundry times to something like this, you have to very deliberately make very specific tradeoffs in the types of clothes you wear and purchase. It is perfectly possible to have a wardrobe that is very low-maintenance (such as by opting for synthetics or synthetic blends for all your clothing), but more likely you have some special cases such as wool, linen, and cotton (which may require air drying and/or ironing or steaming), clothing with small stains that require spot cleaning with stain remover, delicates that need to be hand-washed, whites that need to go in their own load with bleach, or other specific cases.

True. We very much value time over owning things that require that much maintenance. If your preference is the other way round I could see it taking up much more time (and you getting, presumably, more joy from your clothes. Most of the joy I get from clothes is from t-shirt designs. YMMV.)

Yeah, that assumption is correct. So doing laundry for others as well wasn't really something I was considering.

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