Putting a duvet cover back on by yourself

In the last 5 years as a bachelor I've learned a few tips and tricks that I didn't realize until not that long ago that other people don't know! I thought I'd pass this one on.

Every 6 months or so you are forced to do the laundry, or at least when the lumps start to move. If you are the owner of a duvet, especially one of queen size or greater, putting the cover back over the insides can be quite a trick. This is the method I use:

1. Lay out the duvet insides on the bed, tag end towards the foot, about halfway off the base of the bed.
2. Lay the duvet cover, zippered end toward the foot, rightside up, overtop of the duvet insides hereafter known simply as 'the duvet'), but arrange it more towards the head of the bed.
3. Grab either top corner of the duvet and push it into the cover until it finds it's corner. don't try to do anything with the duvet at this point, all you are doing is grabbing the corner with the cover's corner at this point.
4. Repeat for the second of the top corners. You may have to grab the first corner with your teeth while pushing the duvet corner in. Keeping a hold of both is very important! You don't want to let go.
5. Now you have both corners , with a bunched up cover and duvet. Not to worry!
6. At this point stand on your bed (careful of the ceiling!) and shake the duvet. The cover will snake down the duvet and cover it evenly, almost all the way to the bottom.
7. Now all you have to do is push the two ends into their respective corners and do up the zipper. Voila!

This age-old problem arises in most duvet-centric cultures. My own research with the doona ( the Antipodean relative of the duvet) has shown the above method to be highly dependent on the coefficient of friction between the cover and the insides.

If this is too high, it is likely that steps 3 and 4 will result in bunched up insides inside a bunched up cover - a state which will only become more intractable with any efforts to amend the situation.

with this in mind I proffer the following steps to replace steps 3 and 4 above to allow for this case

3. Turn the cover inside out.
3a. Get inside the cover. no really
3b. Hold you arms above your head and manoeuvre your hands into the corners of the cover
3c. Realise you cant see anything in here. Get out, place the insides within easy reach and memorise where they are. Get back in and repeat previous steps.
3d. Grab one corner of the insides in each hand through the cover. Hold on tightly.
4. Bend forward at the hips and shuck, writhe and generally shake your groove thang until the cover is rightside out again. Do NOT let go of the corners.

you should now be able to continue at step 6. Turn off the ceiling fan first.

If you have access to a stairway with a bannister running around the top, I highly recommend you take advantage of this.

Basically you can stand, having stuffed the corners into the far end, hold it over edge and shake it so the fleecey duvet bit goes into the cover.

Now that it's mostly inside, hang the duvet along the bannister sideways and tug randomly at it straightening the duvet inside the cover.

Again, this isn't too different from the methods mentioned above, but the staircase allows you to shake it out to its full length.