I’m not quite sure what gave me this particular idea. 

Perhaps it’s the mountains of laundry I do every week now that we have a baby. 

You just can’t let things pile up if you want to retain some sanity and control. Besides, babies create a lot of dirty clothes. And if you have any backups for important items (crib sheets, sleep sacks, coats, etc.), you want to be sure they’re clean so that you don’t have to wait to do a load of laundry to be able to use it. 

So I decided to look into ways to lighten my load. Literally and figuratively.

I wanted to determine if this would be an efficient use of money to free up time.

Here’s how my laundry service efficiency experiment went down:

Why use a laundry pickup and delivery service?

I was specifically interested in a full-service option for a wash and fold service. If I had to drop off and pick up the laundry, it felt like I might as well just do it myself in the first place.

But outsourcing as much of the process as I found to be worth the cost because it takes a lot of time and energy each week to complete all the steps:

• Collecting and bringing dirty clothes downstairs to laundry room.
• Prepping loads: using mesh bags for delicates, tying hoodie strings together, and other prewashing steps.
• Keeping loads moving within an optimal timeframe so there isn’t a need to rewash clothes and so the weekly process of laundry doesn’t drag on.
• Carrying loads of laundry up the stairs.
• Sorting and folding laundry.
• Putting laundry away.

I’m all about optimizing my time and energy for where they’re best used, which is time with family, friends, and on my business and hobbies. We also outsource house cleaning and use a dairy delivery service. I take advantage of services like grocery delivery and the occasional meal kit delivery service like EveryPlate.

I realize that it’s a luxury to be able to outsource household tasks. I also know myself and know that if all the cleaning tasks fall to me and my husband, we will not stay on top of them.

How I picked a laundry pickup and delivery service

My options were defined and limited by:

• Poundage minimum
• Pickup area
• Cost per pound

The place I picked was about ~$2/pound (the cost dropped if you committed to weekly pickups) and the minimum was 17 pounds. In other words, I expected to pay ~35-40 at minimum to use the service.

Walking through my first laundry pickup and delivery service order

Once I decided on the most ideal local laundry pickup and delivery service option, I started an order.

I was first prompted to pick a date and time, there were plenty of options available:

Next, I had the option to weigh in about every aspect of cleaning and drying my laundry: which detergent to use, whether I wanted to use fabric softener or dryer sheets, water temperature, and so on.

For an additional charge, I could also send out linens like a comforter or bedsheets and dry cleaning. But since this was an experiment, I focused my test on the basic wash and fold service.

I submitted my order with the intention of testing as close to the minimum spend as I could to determine if the value was there for me. 

The normal service is to pick up and deliver within 24 hours — so you barely miss it.

Here’s how it actually went:

My experience with my local laundry pickup and delivery service

After submitting my order, I got a text confirmation and was instructed to leave out laundry in garbage bags on the laundry pickup date.

So I prep my laundry in the week leading up to the pickup date. I scheduled the order for far enough in the future to ensure I have enough dirty clothes to hit the minimum pound requirement. I honestly had no sense of what 17 pounds translated to in terms of packed garbage bags (but I’ll share a guideline from my experience at the end of this laundry pickup and delivery service review).

Since this was my first time trying this type of service, I made a point to hold onto anything new, expensive, or that I wanted to be sure to have on hand — like anything our baby might need before I would get the laundry back.

But I wanted to do a thorough test, so I threw in some items that occasionally vex me when it comes to creating efficiencies with laundry. 

I wanted to determine:

• Would pants with cord ties come back unraveled from each other? 
• Would bras with removable pads come back with all the pieces?

Day of, I get a text asking if they can do pickup a half hour earlier because there was a winter storm warning. I responded affirmatively and set out the bags of laundry and they were picked up.

Communication broke down a little in terms of when I’d be getting the laundry back, and that’s when I started questioning the legitimacy of the outfit behind the service and my life choices (hey, I liked the stuff I sent out to be laundered). 

I was asked if it was ok to possibly deliver a day later than the 24 hours advertised, in the morning, and said that was fine. I ended up getting my laundry later that afternoon. Everything was fine — I overreacted to what was an abnormal situation with the winter storm.

At any rate, I thought they did an excellent job with the laundry itself. It smelled great, had much less clinging dog hair than when I do it, and I can’t say enough good things about the folding. It somehow resulted in stacks of clothes that take up half the space they typically do when I fold them.

Would I use a laundry pickup and delivery service again?

The final bill was close to $100 as I was, unbeknownst to me, well over the 17 pound minimum. I set out 4 fully stuffed kitchen-sized garbage trash bags worth of dirty clothes but would’ve hit the minimum with 2.

I think outside of a winter storm, the process would’ve been a bit more straightforward and smooth, so I’d definitely give it another try.

But ultimately, I’m not sure the price was worth it, at least for weekly laundry needs. I still ended up doing laundry for linens and the things I wanted to have on hand. I still had to spend mental energy on setting up the pickup, ensuring I had enough laundry to hit the minimum (and packaging it up), setting it out during the pickup window, and then stressing over when it would come back when the communicated delivery window had passed.

I think this service would be useful in certain situations like if you’re currently overwhelmed with piling up laundry/household tasks, if you’re coming back from a trip, or if you want to stack efficiencies like getting linens cleaned and dry cleaning done.

Final thoughts: my laundry pickup and delivery service experience

It was absolutely worth it to experiment with a wash and fold service that handled the full process of pickup and delivery. Now that I know how it works, I have a tool at my disposal when I could use the extra hand to get through the colossal task of the family laundry.

Have you tried a wash and fold service? What was your experience? Did it create enough efficiencies to justify the cost?