The following is an unedited, automatically generated transcript from the episode entitled Laundry and Bedroom Reset 2026:

Thanks for joining me.

This episode is going to be a bedroom and laundry reset.

In case you’re new to the show, I’m Ronnie and you’re listening to Clean with Me, the podcast where I talk you through cleaning your house step by step.

0:16

Let’s get right into the episode.

Start a Load of Laundry

It is time to start a load of laundry.

That way, later on, you can do a laundry switch and fold and put away some clothes.

There is going to be an opportunity to put away some residual clean laundry during the episode in case you have some.

0:37

And by residual laundry, I’m talking about a load of clean clothes that you’re going to pull out of the dryer or maybe a laundry basket or some larger bin where you keep your clean laundry that you don’t fold right away.

Hopefully you’re folding stuff right out of the dryer, but some of us don’t always do that, myself included.

0:57

So I do have a place for clean laundry in case I have to just put it somewhere.

Yes, that’s one of my housekeeping weaknesses, and that’s OK.

I do a lot of other good things in my life.

And you know, housework isn’t everything, but it’s definitely something that we need to set aside time for and it does boost our mood and keep the people in our house happy and all kinds of benefits.

1:24

So I’m glad you tuned in today.

Again, hopefully you’re starting a load of laundry.

Maybe you need to wash some towels and underwear, just kind of a survival load.

Or maybe you want to strip a bed and start washing sheets and pillowcases.

If you’re washing a comforter, I recommend hanging it up to dry if at all possible because I hate getting into that cycle where I have to kind of readjust the comforter and then start the dryer over again.

1:52

So I like to just hang mine up.

I hang comforters either over chairs or over this room divider that I have.

That way I can keep the laundry going.

I can put something else into the dryer instead of restarting it to dry that comforter.

2:12

Maybe you have a clothesline out in the backyard if you have an older home, but I just recommend hanging up comforters if possible unless you have a super effective dryer that just dries a comforter in record time.

But some of us don’t purchase top of the line appliances.

2:31

So I’m going to give you like one more minute to start that load of laundry and then we’re going to head to the bedroom.

I mean, while you’re in the laundry room, it’s always a good time to straighten it up.

You know, maybe you have a hamper that’s overflowing or maybe you need to throw away the lint in your lint container or just tidy up the shelf that’s above your washer and dryer.

2:54

Now is the time to start that load and straighten up that room while you’re in it.

And then we’re going to be cleaning your bedroom.

And not just cleaning it, but thinking about how we’re storing things if having a messy bedroom is an ongoing problem for you, OK.

3:17

Because some of us kind of struggle with keeping our bedroom organized.

It tends to get put last.

In a lot of my whole House episodes, I have you straight in your bedroom at the end.

And that’s because I know it’s not your top priority, but years ago I read a book that recommended you start with your room because that’s where you go to bed, That’s where you wake up.

3:39

And having clean surroundings in your bedroom is super beneficial.

So there’s definitely a case for prioritizing your bedroom.

And that’s what we’re doing in this episode.

Make the Bed

OK, One of the first things you might want to do in your bedroom is make the bed.

3:58

It’s a springboard task that immediately makes your room look better, and it also gives you a place to put things.

So maybe you need to put fresh sheets and pillowcases onto your bed if you just stripped it and go ahead and make that bed.

4:16

Even when my favorite sheets and my favorite comforter are in the wash, I don’t wash them in the same load.

But you know, if my sheets or my comforter are in the wash, I sometimes make my bed just with a complete alternate set of sheets, pillowcases and comforter so that my room can look nice right away and I’ll have a place to put things while I’m cleaning.

4:45

Because when you’re cleaning your room, the first thing you want to do after making your bed is get everything picked up off of the floor.

Clean Your Room

Most items you’re going to put away where they go, but some items in your room are going to cause you to pause.

5:01

Maybe you aren’t sure if it’s if these items are clean or dirty or if you even want to keep them at all.

Or maybe they go in another room.

Or maybe it’s clean laundry and you don’t really have time to put it away just yet.

I do want you to be able to put things on your bed that require decisions and slow you down so that you get the floor picked up right away.

5:28

OK?

I’m a firm believer in cleaning in the order of priority.

Getting your bed made and getting everything up off of the floor makes a huge visual difference in your room.

So, for example, if you have any trash in your room, you might want to bring in a trash bag to throw away the trash.

5:49

Or if you’re like me, you have waste baskets in your room.

Or maybe you want to just grab those few items and take them to your kitchen wastebasket.

Everybody’s lifestyle is different.

I don’t like to put any food trash, garbage if you will, in my bedroom waste baskets, but I have them for other things just to keep my my room from getting cluttered.

6:14

OK?

So just depending on what the trash is, you might put it in your bedroom wastebasket, you might put it into a bag, you might take it to the kitchen, OK.

But once your bed is made, I want you to look around for any trash.

Often trash is lurking on a night stand or a desk.

6:33

OK, let’s get that stuff picked up and thrown away.

OK, Whether you keep your recycling stuff separate or it all goes into one bin, I want you to deal with any trash.

And you might have paper clutter in your room if you have a desk in there or that’s where you pay your bills.

6:54

And maybe some of that goes into a shred pile.

Maybe you have a shredder and a little box by it.

Let’s just deal with anything in the category of trash or recycling first.

Once the beds made OK, and some of you needed more time to make your bed because you’ve got all these fancy pillows and whatnot.

7:13

But others of us keep it pretty simple.

I mean, I don’t even have shams right now.

I mean, when I’m expecting guests from out of town, sometimes I’m putting like the shams on, you know, you’ve got your, your pillows that you sleep on with the regular pillowcases and then you’ve got another set of pillows with the decorative shams that match your comforter.

7:39

I sometimes do that when I’m having guests overnight or for the week, which typically happens over the holidays, you know, to where people are actually going to be walking into my room at some point.

But for every day I I make my bed with a comforter and you know, she’s a comforter and then just pillowcases on the bed, pillows, all four of them.

8:07

So however you make your bed, once you’ve made it deal with any trash, once you’ve dealt with the trash, the next thing you’re going to deal with is shoes and clothing.

OK, clothing either needs to go into the hamper or it needs to get put away.

8:30

Sometimes when I’m cleaning my room, when I have things that are clean that just need to get hung up, you know, maybe I’ve draped some sweaters over the ironing board instead of hanging them up immediately.

My husband tends to drape clothing over a recliner that we have in our room.

8:49

That kind of stuff.

You can put it away or you can create a hang up pile on your bed if you want to put that off to the end of the till the end of the cleaning session.

OK, but you’re going to deal with clothes.

9:05

They’re either dirty or they’re clean or you haven’t decided yet and you want to just lay them on the bed.

OK, your your future decision pile.

And of course with shoes they should go in your closet.

9:24

For a while.

One of my sons was just lining up his shoes along the wall of his bedroom and I’m like can’t these go in the closet floor?

Like that would look better.

I have a shoe rack in my closet now.

9:41

Not at all of my husband’s.

And my shoes fit in the shoe rack.

Ideally we should get a second one, like have his and hers shoe racks, but right now there’s just one shoe rack.

But you might be thinking, well, why do I need a shoe rack?

9:59

If you keep your closet floor super pristine, you could line up all the shoes.

But some of us need to use like vertical space because we’re storing other stuff in the closet floor and it gets messy sometimes.

10:16

Either it gets messy sometimes or we just need to utilize vertical space.

I have a walk in closet, but it’s definitely a small walk in closet.

And I think it would be easier to keep the shoes organized if I purchased a second shoe rack.

10:32

You might just need one or you might have lots of shoes.

But another benefit of the shoe rack is I worry that if I put the shoes on the floor, one of the dogs might chew them up.

So my more important shoes I put in the rack.

10:51

There is also a shelf in my closet.

I’m not talking about the one up at the top, but there’s a lower shelf.

But my husband’s storing a lot of other stuff there.

So it’s not really a good place for shoes either.

11:08

But I think maybe it’s designed to be a shoe shelf.

So maybe you have a shoe shelf.

Hopefully you’re putting away clothes and shoes, but you’re also going to come across other items in your room maybe that belong in another room.

11:24

You might want to make a pile for stuff that doesn’t belong in your room.

You could put it by the door or outside the door or on your bed, however you want to do that.

I’m also hoping that you have a place in your closet for stuff that you want to donate, you know?

11:41

If not, you might want to grab a box or container for that.

If you’re just in survival mode and your room’s a complete disaster and you’re just trying to get everything put away, this might not be a day where you want to think about donating items, but you might be doing a little bit of decluttering.

12:00

Recently, I’ve been hanging up a lot more of my clothes, and I’ve been hanging up clothes in a hidden corner that are offseason or just things where I’m not sure whether I even want to keep them because I want the main part of my closet to be full of things that I wear all the time.

12:21

I don’t want to experience decision fatigue when I go to get dressed to where I’m looking at items and going, oh I I’m not sure if I want to wear this dress because I don’t really like how the waistline hits, but I can’t put a chain belt on it because there’s a seam at the wrong place and then it looks like it’s got 2 waists and that doesn’t make sense.

12:44

You know, these problematic items might need to go into your donation box or bag in the back of your closet.

Or if you think that something might look good with an accessory that you might buy down the road, like this dress would work with a chain belt, but instead of a gold chain belt, I want a silver chain belt.

13:04

You can kind of put those in the hidden corner of your closet or just off to one side to deal with later.

Sometimes you need to put off a decision.

And I feel like a lot of decluttering experts are like, no, you need to make these decisions right now.

13:20

But I, I tend to disagree there.

It is OK to have some things that maybe you’re not sure if you want to keep, as long as you’re able to store them out of sight and as long as you don’t have to rummage through those items to get to your everyday favorites, OK.

13:43

Same with drawers.

I think one of your drawers should be stuff.

I hardly ever wear drawer.

Like if you hardly ever put on a swimsuit, that’s where that stuff could be.

There was a phase where I was using swimsuits more often because when my husband would stay in a hotel on business, we would often go with him and there was an indoor pool.

14:09

So there was an era where we were going swimming year round.

But right now, I hardly ever put on a swimsuit.

There’s just not a lot of occasions that call for it.

I definitely bring it with me in my suitcase when I’m traveling in the summertime.

14:25

Now, obviously you can take it too far when it comes to keeping stuff, but I feel like some delayed decisions are OK because maybe six months from now you’ll do a wardrobe purge and be like, you know what?

14:42

I don’t like this dress with any belt.

I’m going to get rid of it.

I bought a belt and still didn’t want to wear the dress and I can go in the donation pile.

So maybe you’re putting things in the donation pile or maybe you’re putting things into more of a long term storage location, like a plastic tub that slides under your bed or a corner or a side of your closet or that drawer for the rarely used items.

15:12

OK, but what I want you to do is be observant in your room and make sure that you’re storing things out of sight.

Do you have any items on the floor sitting around the perimeter of your room?

15:29

Boxes or other random items?

OK, For example, right now I have a pack and play that’s folded up and it’s just next to a wall in my room that technically belongs in the back of my closet.

15:46

But I have to reorganize my closet periodically because sometimes I’m just sticking things in there in a hurry to get them out of sight.

You know, I’m not perfect by any means, but the next time I reorganize my closet, I’m going to put that pack and play in the back of the closet because I don’t use it very often.

16:06

I certainly don’t need it cluttering up the perimeter of my room.

If you know, you know, some of us have a tendency to place items along the walls, but that doesn’t make your room feel like a luxurious hotel when there’s all this visual clutter.

16:27

OK, So I want you to be mindful of that.

Yes, you probably need to dust your night stands or your TV screen or your dressers.

Maybe you need to clean a sliding glass door if you have a sliding glass door in your bedroom, or clean a window, or clean a window sill, or dust some blinds.

16:45

But in this episode, I want you to first make sure that your floor is picked up and that you’ve stored as much out of sight as possible.

OK, by now you’ve probably gotten your floor picked up because you put away the clothes, you put away the shoes, you put away items that didn’t fall into that category.

17:10

Now you can either put away those miscellaneous items that maybe you placed on the bed, or if you don’t have a lot of stuff like that, this would be a great time to work on folding and hanging up and putting away that residual laundry.

17:28

OK, that residual clean laundry pile mount fold more, as I like to call it.

That’s how I want you to spend the rest of this episode.

And I mentioned that this is a laundry reset.

Maybe you need to set a timer on your phone to remind you of when your washing machine cycle will be over.

17:50

I mean, most washing machine cycles are anywhere from like 20 to 55 minutes, OK?

So if you’re not sure how long your washing machine takes, you could set the timer for an hour and then that way you’ll go back and put the put that laundry into the dryer and you could continue doing that for the entire day.

18:12

The thing about getting caught up on laundry is you don’t have to stay home.

You can go get your groceries.

You can pick somebody up from school.

You can do all the things and just kind of have your laundry going in the background.

You can either set a timer for when to do the laundry switch or just keep checking on the laundry in between errands or whatever else you’re working on.

18:38

Maybe you work from home or you’re doing some college classes online.

You turn in another assignment or you know you’ve been sitting for an hour.

You know working from home and you want to get up at least once every hour, you know, to get get your blood circulating and you know, not get too sedentary.

18:58

Because my watch tells me how many times I got up in a 12 hour period with the goal of getting me to not stay seated too long.

So that could be a great time to do a laundry switch.

19:13

When I was working a full time job from home, I typically did a laundry switch on my lunch break.

You know these things that punctuate our day, whether it’s a lunch break from a work at home job or picking somebody up from school.

19:29

Some of you, your kids might already be out of school, mine are, but you could be listening to this in the future.

During the school year, whatever it is that you do during the day routinely can punctuate your day and remind you to do a laundry switch.

19:46

Or you might literally need to set an alarm on your phone and put laundry switch.

OK, but part of what’s making this episode of Laundry Reset is I’m encouraging you to get caught up on your laundry today.

20:03

Long after this episode is over, I’m hoping you’re still going to be doing laundry switches or maybe just folding and putting away residual clean laundry.

Sometimes I kind of tell myself, like, don’t wash any more laundry until you fold and put away all those clean clothes that are in the bin.

20:24

OK?

Sometimes I want to get down to article of clothing 0.

For those of you who have been listening to my show for a while, you know, I talked about getting down to dish 0 instead of, you know, washing your dishes and leaving a couple things in the sink or whatever.

Some of you need to force yourself to get down to article of clothing 0 in that laundry basket or bin before you wash more stuff.

20:49

OK, but you can just keep resetting a laundry switch alarm on the hour throughout the day and then just go about your day.

Obviously if you’re going to go work an 8 hour shift outside the home for the whole day, you’re not going to do the laundry switch till you get home.

21:07

But a lot of you are going to be home all day today, and maybe you’re home all day every day other than errands.

And you can be doing laundry in the background.

OK, so this is your little pep talk about laundry.

21:23

Some of you are procrastinating on doing laundry because you have too much.

There was definitely a period of time before I started the show where my husband would sometimes go out and buy himself more socks, underwear and T-shirts because he was running out of things and didn’t want to dig through the clean laundry pile.

21:49

You don’t want to get in a situation like that where you’re buying more and more stuff.

So getting caught up on laundry and tossing items that are ripped, stained, worn out can help keep the amount of laundry under control.

22:10

Maybe you have some old raggedy towels that could be stored out in the garage for an emergency.

I definitely like to have ugly towels on hand, You know, to clean up the human vomit, dog vomit, or whatever else.

22:28

Or even just to drive the cars with.

When I was a kid, we always put our old towels out in the garage.

We’d fold them and put them on a shelf in the garage, and those were the towels we used to dry the cars and whatnot.

But I don’t want you to have just this huge inventory of towels in your towel cupboard of your bathroom or in your clean laundry pile, because then you’re just going to go longer and longer without washing towels, and then it’s going to take you more than a day to get caught up on laundry.

23:03

You see what I’m saying?

Some people can’t relate to this.

People who are super organized with their clothing do not feel like they need to have less stuff.

Especially if you fold and put things away right out of the dryer.

23:20

Your husband’s not having to go out and buy more socks, underwear and T-shirts.

OK, but if you’re in that situation, be mindful of of it and, and try, try to fix it, try to get caught up, try to take some older items out of circulation.

23:41

Because if he just replaced all that stuff, then he doesn’t need the stained T-shirts or the holy socks anymore or ripped underwear or whatever, OK?

So I definitely encourage you, if at all possible, to make this a laundry day, whether you’re going to be home all day or you’re going to be in and out of the house.

24:03

OK.

And there are a lot of bonus tasks you can do in your room.

This might not be a deep cleaning day for you, but some of you need to dust your TV screen or clean a mirror.

You know, grab some glass cleaner and a microfiber cloth and clean your mirrors.

24:23

Clean your TV screens.

I’ve got a full length mirror inside of my closet hanging on the closet door and it could use some cleaning.

I’ve got little grandkids who put their fingerprints on everything.

24:38

The other day my teenage daughter cleaned the sliding glass door in the kitchen and as soon as the grandkids got home from their dads, it was all printed up.

So some of you might need to bust out some glass cleaner and a microfiber cloth.

24:56

Others of you might want to dust wooden furniture.

You know, grab that pledge or whatever dusting spray you use and clean those night stands and clean the dresser.

And when you clean surfaces, it forces you to 1st clear those surfaces.

25:12

OK, You can’t vacuum or sweep your room until you’ve picked up the floor and you can’t dust off your desk until you’ve tidied it up and organized it.

If you do have a problem with paper clutter in your room, you might need a basket for papers that you’re going to deal with later, kind of an in basket.

25:32

You might even want to have like that three tiered system where you’ve got your in basket, you’re out basket, and maybe a third category for something else stationary or something.

Mailing supplies.

I don’t know what, but for me, I just have a basket.

25:49

That’s my end basket.

And typically when I get mail, I toss the junk mail and I put the bills and other important documents in that end basket.

And then from time to time I sit down and have kind of a clerical day where I’m paying bills and shredding, which for me, by shredding I’m just tearing it up by hand, but tearing up and tossing the bills that I don’t need.

26:19

I like to keep the most recent utility bills, but I don’t need 5-6 months worth of them.

And arguably most things like that you could print online if you need to, but I like to keep the recent ones in case I want to create a new budget and know exactly how much everything is, you know, how much is my electric bill lately?

26:41

Or somebody’s going to the DMV and they need proof of residence.

You know, that’s another situation where you’re going to want to grab their, you know, those recent utility bills and mortgage statements and things like that.

OK, but if paper clutter is taking over your room, you you need at least a build basket.

27:03

Or alternatively you might put things like that in your top drawer.

There was a time where we kept things like that in our our top drawer.

Now we use that for other things.

Anyway, I’m I’m out of time.

I hope you got your room tidied up, your bed made, and you have a plan for getting caught up on laundry and maybe you folded and put away some items.

27:24

I encourage you to sweep your bedroom floor or vacuum it after this episode.

If it’s a hard floor, you might need to both sweep and mop.

I feel like mopping happens a lot more in the kitchen than it does in other rooms.

27:40

A lot of times sweeping a room will suffice.

OK, at least sweep or vacuum your bedroom after this episode.

Thank you so much for listening.

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27:56

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28:21

Thank you so much for listening.

I appreciate each and everyone of you.

And as always, happy cleaning.

I’ll talk to you in the next episode.