Use this cheat sheet to understand what all those complicated laundry instructions mean

Laundry. Unless we all go naked, it never, ever ends. The more people wearing the clothes, the more you wash. The more little people in your house—perhaps averaging about 15 wardrobe changes a day—the more you wash. Between all the washing and drying and folding, I’m happy if the laundry makes it off my couch and into the drawers.

Due to the mountain that is my laundry pile, I must admit: I don’t spend a tremendous amount of time thinking (or caring) about how to wash each specific garment. In full confession, I have never (not even once) flipped a tag over to try and decipher the symbols that exist there. It just seems too hard. If the tag doesn’t explicitly say “DRY CLEAN ONLY,” I ignore all other suggestions and wash on cold. It just seems like the easiest path to take.

In fact, if there’s any effort I take beyond this, it’s simply to split all of the clothes up into separate piles for lights and darks. The end.

But here’s to personal growth in the name of clean clothes. Because the good folks at Primer have created a cheat sheet:

I don’t know… In reading through this cheat sheet, I can’t help but imagine every item of clothing in my house requiring a slightly different technique for both washing and drying. Which means that, in the end, I’d have to do approximately eleventy billion different loads of laundry.

Per day.

But if you’re feeling ambitious, you should maybe just go ahead and print out this handy chart. And then laminate it so that it doesn’t get ruined by the moisture in your laundry room. And then, when it’s ready, hang it right next to that cute sign in your laundry room about missing socks.

If only this cheat sheet came with a laundry-doing robot.