Laundry Wars: The Tide goes out

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Laundry Wars: The Tide goes out

Posted by: Connie Nelson under Home Improvement Updated: January 26, 2010 - 9:48 AM

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In our house, there’s only one battleground: the laundry room.

A normal couple might fight about who should wash the clothes. We fight about who shouldn’t.

That’s because we disagree on how it should he done. He likes warm water, I like hot.

He likes Tide, I like Seventh Generation.

He says my green detergent doesn’t get the clothes clean, I say his stinky detergent makes the clothes reek of cheap perfume. Instead of calling the whole thing off, we came to a compromise on Tide Free. The granular kind that comes in a box.

He claimed it cleaned well enough for him and I admitted that its unscented scent suited me just fine.

It seemed to work until the day I came home to THE SMELL. I knew something was wrong before I got in the door. “Eeeew. What’s that?” I asked. My husband was both guilty and defensive: “They were out of Tide Free,” he said. “This was all they had.”This” was Clean Breeze Tide with Bleach. To me, it had an overpowering, fakey smell, nothing breezy about it.

I was desperate because we were out of laundry detergent, the piles of dirty clothes were threatening spill out into the hall and this was my only night to do the wash. So I ripped the 142-ounce box open and started in on the laundry. The clothes got done. And while they smelled of “Evening in Paris,” no one around me seemed to notice. But every time I went into the laundry room I was overwhelmed by THE SMELL. I decided the Tide had to go. Because I’m too cheap to dump an almost-full box of laundry detergent, I offered it to the neighbors. When they declined, I left the box on the back step.

“It’s off-gassing,” I explained to my husband. (I didn’t catch his response. It might have been a growl.)

Have I told you my theory of leaving things be? I’m convinced that we stop seeing things after a while. The crack in the living room ceiling, the dent in the wood floor, the pile of mail on the TV . . . it all becomes as invisible as a box of Clean Breeze Tide with Bleach on the back step.

And then it snowed. There are no battles about shoveling. My husband does it. Before he got to the back step, the box of laundry detergent was back in the laundry room. By then, I’d picked up a box of Seventh Generation and a box of Tide Free. Now I mix them all together. And I like to think my laundry smells like something wonderfully sweet: household harmony.

Do you have laundry wars? Who does most of the washing? Is your family sensitive to perfumes? Have you found green clean solutions? What works for you and yours?

older post

Get a grip on winter walking

newer post

Laundry wars II: Make your own

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