I just put my sheets in the washing machine with some liquid bleach in the water.  Yikes!  The problem with bleach is that it does its job too well.  Every time I use bleach to clean my laundry (or for anything else), I later discover tiny (and sometimes not-so-tiny) white bleach spots on the clothes I was wearing when I measured and poured the bleach.  No matter how carefully I work, I always make a mess.  I can’t tell you how many shirts and pants I’ve had to get rid of because of bleach spots or little holes in my clothes where bleach ate through the fibers.  And I don’t buy clothes very often, so it’s a big deal to have to toss an article of clothing every couple of times I use bleach.  It’s gotten so I only use the stuff a couple of times a year because I’m afraid that no matter how careful I am, or whether or not I’m wearing any clothes at the time, I will make a mistake and end up spilling or splashing the stuff on something that will be ruined by it.

I had a friend once who used bleach pretty much every day.  She would clean her bathrooms and kitchen with it regularly and wash her white clothes in it.  She diluted it for some things, used it straight from the bottle for other tasks.  She said it made her feel certain that the house was disinfected and it would keep her family from getting sick.  I told her about my fear of ruining everything darker than white and asked how she managed to keep the bleach only where she meant for it to go, and not bleach anything unbleachable.  She told me that she wears an old sweat shirt on top of her clothes, and that seemed to do the trick of keeping everything safe.

I imagine myself donning an old, ratty sweatshirt atop my blouse and bluejeans, then pouring bleach into the washing machine with the laundry.  So far so good…oh, but somehow some of it splashes onto my jeans!  Bleach spot.  Then I imagine wearing the same sweatshirt and jeans and cleaning the bathroom counter and floor with a bucket of diluted bleach.  Ooops…the cuff of my blouse gets out from under the sweatshirt while I dip a sponge in the bleach water and gets whitened.  Then I kneel on a still-wet portion of my newly cleaned floor to clean a stubborn spot and I have a white knee.  I don’t think a sweatshirt will do it for me.

The jury is still out on whether my current clothes have been ruined by my recent attempt to whiten and brighten my sheets, but I’m willing to guess that I’ve got some damage.  There must be a better way.  Do you use bleach often?  How do you manage to keep it on the things it should be on and off the things it shouldn’t?

Yesterday I cleaned the laundry room.  I wiped down the washer and dryer, emptied the garbage (it really needed to be emptied, too), swept and mopped the floor.  Then I threw out all the old empty bottles of laundry detergent and bleach.  I moved stuff around so that the shelves were organized and purged the old rag bag since I'd added my old dishtowels to the pile and had too many.  I cleaned the shelves, which were covered in liquid laundry detergent. 

Someday I'd like to paint the room a cheery color, maybe lavender or light green.  Then I want to put up a framed poster of Robert Fulghum's laundry essay.  He's the guy who wrote All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten.  I don't think that his laundry essay exists in poster form, so I'd probably have to create one myself, but it's pleasant and makes me like laundry when I read it.  There's not much that makes me like laundry, so might as well get it all in my laundry-doing place.