By Timothy Oommen, Owner — Laundini Laundromat | laundinilaundromat.com
We wash thousands of loads of laundry across four locations in Cook County every month.
And I can tell you, without exaggeration, that the single most common thing we see when a customer’s bag comes in is no sorting whatsoever. Everything in one bag. Whites with darks. Jeans with silk. Towels with everything. A receipt from 2023 still in a pocket. Sometimes a pen. Once, memorably, a chapstick that did not survive the spin cycle and took three t-shirts with it.
Sorting laundry is not complicated. But nobody ever really taught most people how to do it properly, so they either wing it and hope for the best, or they just don’t bother.
This is the guide I wish existed when I started handling other people’s clothes professionally. Read it once and you’ll never ruin a load again.
The Three Piles You Actually Need
Forget any sorting system you’ve heard that involves six categories and a color-coded hamper. In practice, you need three piles. That’s it.
Pile 1: Lights
Whites, creams, pastels, light grays. Anything that would look obviously wrong if it came out slightly pink or slightly blue.
Pile 2: Darks
Black, navy, dark gray, dark brown, dark green. Colors that are deep enough that they won’t visibly transfer onto each other but will absolutely transfer onto lights.
Pile 3: Delicates
Anything with a tag that gives you instructions. Lace, silk, thin cotton, anything stretchy, bras, anything you’d be genuinely upset about if it came back damaged. These don’t go with the general population. Ever.
That’s the whole system. Three piles. If you do nothing else from this guide, do this.
The Red Rule
This deserves its own section because it has cost people more ruined laundry than any other sorting mistake.
Anything red is a liability until proven otherwise.
New red clothes bleed. Aggressively, enthusiastically, and without apology. A new red t-shirt in a load of whites will turn every single item in that machine a shade of pink that no amount of rewashing will fully undo. It has happened to people who knew better and got lazy about it once. It will happen to you if you don’t take this seriously.
The rule: wash any new red item — shirts, towels, bedding, anything — completely alone for its first two washes. Fill the machine, run it through, see what comes out in the water. If the water runs clear by the second wash, it’s earned the right to join other clothes. Until then, it lives alone.
This applies to any deeply saturated new color — burgundy, bright orange, cobalt blue — but red is the worst offender by a significant margin. We treat every new red item that comes through our locations as a solo project until it proves itself.
What Happens When You Put Towels With Delicates
Towels are the tanks of the laundry world. Heavy, rough-textured, and they need heat and agitation to actually get clean. Delicates are the opposite — lightweight, sensitive to friction, and easily damaged by exactly the conditions towels require.
When you wash them together, one of two things happens. Either the delicates get battered by the towels and come out stretched, pilled, or snagged. Or you wash everything on the delicate cycle to protect the fragile items, and your towels come out damp and faintly musty because they didn’t get the wash they actually needed.
There is no temperature or cycle setting that is correct for both towels and delicates simultaneously. They are fundamentally incompatible loads. Wash them separately, always.
The Temperature Logic
Most people either wash everything in cold because they’re afraid of shrinkage, or they use whatever the machine defaults to without thinking about it. Here’s the actual logic:
Cold water — use this for darks, colors, delicates, and anything you’re not sure about. Cold water protects color, prevents shrinkage, and is gentler on fabric. It’s also better for the environment and your electricity bill. When in doubt, cold.
Warm water — a middle ground that doesn’t get used enough. Good for synthetic fabrics, lightly soiled everyday clothes, and loads where you want a bit more cleaning power than cold without the aggression of hot.
Hot water — reserve this for whites and heavily soiled items only. Hot water whitens, disinfects, and lifts deep grime in a way cold water can’t. But it will shrink, fade, and damage anything that isn’t built for it. Hot water on a dark load is how you turn a black shirt into a dark gray shirt over the course of a few months. Use it deliberately, not by default.
At Laundini, our default is cold for darks and colors, and hot only for whites and loads that genuinely need it. We don’t use hot carelessly because we’ve seen what it does over time.
Check Every Pocket. Every Single One.
This is the pre-wash habit that sounds obvious until you hear what we find.
Receipts are harmless. Tissues are not — they disintegrate in the wash and coat everything in the load with tiny white specks that take forever to pick off. A forgotten pen will leak and leave ink stains on multiple items that are essentially permanent. A chapstick will melt in the dryer and leave grease stains on everything it touches. A lip balm once destroyed three t-shirts in one of our machines and the customer was devastated. A single AirPod survived a full wash cycle but did not survive what the dryer did to it afterward.
Check every pocket before you put anything in the machine. Jacket pockets, jeans pockets, the small weird pocket inside the right pocket of your jeans that nobody uses but everyone forgets to check. All of them.
While you’re at it: zip up any zippers. Open metal zippers act like small cheese graters inside a spinning drum, catching on other fabrics and pulling threads. Zip them closed before washing and the problem disappears entirely.
Turn dark clothes inside out. The friction of washing fades the outer surface of dark fabric over time. Washing inside out exposes the inner surface to the agitation instead, protecting the color on the outside that people actually see.
The Items That Always Need to Be Alone
Beyond towels and delicates, a few categories always get their own load:
New dark clothes — the first wash of any new dark item, especially black, should be solo or with similar new darks. New dye runs.
Anything red or deeply saturated and new — covered above, but worth repeating. Solo. Always.
Heavily soiled items — work clothes with real grime, muddy kids’ clothes, anything that’s been in contact with something genuinely dirty. These go alone so they don’t transfer soil to the rest of the load.
Bedding — sheets and duvet covers are large enough that they need the whole machine to move freely and get clean. Stuff them in with a regular load and they ball up, trap other items inside them, and nothing gets properly washed.
What We Do at Laundini
When your laundry comes in for pickup, this is exactly how we handle it:
Every load gets sorted into lights, darks, and delicates before anything goes near a machine. Reds and new items get flagged. Pockets get checked — yes, yours too, and yes, we have found things. Temperature is set by load type, not habit. Delicates get their own cycle. Towels get their own load.
It adds time. We do it anyway, because it’s the difference between laundry that comes back right and laundry that comes back with a story you didn’t want.
If you’d rather hand us the bag and let us handle the sorting entirely — that’s exactly what our pickup and delivery service is for.
Book a pickup at laundinilaundromat.com. We serve all of Cook County — Evanston, Bucktown, Skokie, Wheeling, and everywhere in between. Your clothes will come back sorted, washed, and folded correctly. We promise.
Timothy Oommen is the founder and owner of Laundini Laundromat.