Refresh You Clothes and Reduce Your Ironing

Every fall, I pack my summer clothes into Rubbermaid bins and store them away in my storage locker, down in the basement of my apartment building. They stay there for almost 9 months before warm weather encourages me to bring them out again. 

The bins do a great job of keeping my clothes clean, dry, and moth free but, when I unpack them, my clothes come out smelling not bad exactly, but storage-y: kind of musty and not fresh.  Also, because I pack the totes tightly, everything ends up creased and wrinkled.  

On the scale of domestic challenges, I figure this barely registers at all but, still, getting those clothes ready to wear does make for a tedious chore. In past years I've re-laundered all my clothes after taking them out of storage, and then ironed them all before putting them away in my dressers and closet.  It was a lot of work. This year I wanted to simplify the process.  

I'd washed them before storing them in the bins, so my clothes were already clean. I decided to try a little experiment.  Instead of laundering them again, I hung a few of my T-shirts on hangers along the shower curtain rod in the bathroom and used a spray bottle to dampen them all over with water.  After that,I did nothing at all but leave them alone until they were dry.

The photo above shows the results.  It worked very well.  Not only did my T-shirts regain their freshness, but most of the wrinkles relaxed right out of the fabric.  They weren't perfectly smooth like they'd be if I ironed them but, hey, they're T-shirts.  The results were good enough that I'd wear them without pressing them first.

I repeated the hanging/spraying/drying process with the rest of the clothing from my bins and the results were good throughout.  I still chose to press some of the dressier items but, having removed so many of the wrinkles from the fabric before I ironed, the job went much more quickly than it would have with clothing straight from storage.

So there you have it:  Simple, work saving, and free. Housekeeping tasks don't get much better than that.