I absolutely love the smell of clean laundry, preferably right off the clothes line.  Before we moved out to the country laundry was one of my most dreaded chores; it meant lugging basket after basket of laundry up and down the long, steep basement stairs.  I spent countless hours each week doing this, and hating every minute of it.  Our laundry was never done (and really it can't be, unless you want to spend the day naked!) and there were always piles of dirty and clean clothes everywhere.  I tried the notion of designating one day to be my laundry day, and then found that we were running out of things before the week was through.  Two days became laundry days, but if I had anything else to do that day (away from the house) we still weren't getting very far.

Once we moved we invested in a new washer and dryer, both high efficiency.  I can't even begin to tell you how much I love my laundry room now!  Our new laundry area is right off my kitchen (no more climbing into the bowels of the house just to do laundry!) with it's own set of cabinets so no more unsightly bottles cluttering the top of the washer and dryer.  I can now do a load or two every few days and stay on track with the laundry - including regularly washing the bed clothes.

Living where we do we have a septic tank instead of city sewer.  As a result I take some extra precautions with our laundry.  Lint from washing machines is one of the leading causes of expensive septic system failure.   One preventative measure that you can do is install a lint filter to catch the lint at its source.  In addition to using a lint filter to prevent this problem, it is also very important to avoid overloading the system with water.  Spread out your laundry loads, don't wait for things to pile up, wash when you have a full load.  Also, make sure to wash your clothes with a liquid detergent, powdered detergents often contain fillers which can plug up the drain field and lines.  The laundry detergent we use is All Small and Mighty.  I love the fresh rain scent and a little bit goes a long way.

When we were first married we had terribly hard water, really we just had terrible water.  It was nothing for the water to be turned off for hours (sometimes days!) at a time and each time it came back on you had to let it run for quite a while to get all of the sediment from the old pipes out of the water.  Thankfully, we no longer have to worry about this problem, but if you have hard water a nifty little trick you can try is to add a couple of pinches of salt to your laundry detergent when you wash colors.  The colors will come out much brighter.  We also had to be careful not to wash our whites (or any light colors) after the water had come back on or we were sure to get rust stains.  A good way to remove rust stains is to mix a few tablespoons of lemon juice into a gallon of hot water and let your whites soak in this mixture.  It will not harm fabrics the way bleach will and will leave your whites bright and stain free!