Towels – How Much is Enough?

The number of towels you should have is dictated by several factors:

• The number of people in the household. (Each person should have their own bath towel.)
• The number of bathrooms in the household. (Each bathroom should have its own towel for drying washed hands. It could even be one person’s bath towel.)
• The number of times each person feels comfortable using their bath towel before laundering it. (If everyone can tolerate using one towel a week, then the amount of laundry will be decreased.)
• The frequency of laundering loads of towels.
  

If you can restrict everyone in the house to using one bath towel for the whole week, then that will save someone (probably you) from having to do so much laundry in the form of towels.

While all the towels are in the laundry, there must be clean towels to put in their place. That means the number of bath towels should be at least double the number of people in the household. Two people, four towels minimum.

How about towels for guests? If you take the maximum number of people you have ever had stay overnight as guests at your house, that is probably the number of extra towels you need beyond the minimum. If you’ve never had overnight guests, then you probably don’t really need to have extra towels. In a pinch, an unexpected crasher can use a secondary towel.

There may be additional factors to consider. Add an extra set of towels for everybody if your family often goes swimming, or dances in the rain, or periodically bathes your pets.

The number of towels your household should have doesn’t have to be guesswork. It should be calculated based upon your family’s needs. Doing this ensures that your precious space will not be wasted on what is unnecessary.

What to do with all those magazines?

Many organizing books and professional organizers will tell you that you should deal with those stacks of magazines by going through them and tearing out the pages of the articles that you really want to save and then put those pages into binders.

I say something completely different.

DON’T DO IT.

Just DON’T.

TOSS them without looking at them.

Here’s why. First, magazine articles are so short and shallow these days that it is likely that any advice you find in a magazine will be common sense that you can find on the internet if you search for it. Yeah, magazine articles are fluff these days. Second, if the craft ideas don’t grab you in that intense “OH-MY-GOSH-I-MUST-MAKE-SOMETHING-LIKE-THAT-IMMEDIATELY-OR-I-WILL-DIE” way, you will never do it and you will likely never look at it again. Looking at it and thinking, “Oh, that’s cool” is not a strong enough reason to keep the craft idea. You’ll never get to it, with all the other important and urgent things of life. You just won’t, and it’s not because you’re a weak person. In fact, you won't get to them because you are a strong person; you will find other activities more important. And you’ll be perfectly right NOT to get to it, because IT ISN’T IMPORTANT ENOUGH TO YOU.

So dump those extra magazines in the recycling bin. Or blindfold yourself and do it. Or ask your Significant Other to do it at the dead of night while you are asleep so you won’t know of the deed until it is an accomplished fact.

Get rid of them.

Clean as you go

In our church we have a scripture that talks about not procrastinating the day of our repentance until it is everlastingly too late. The idea is that you are better off if you repent immediately after you discover you have sinned.

In the realms of home organization, this principle transfers over nicely into the principle of not procrastinating cleanup. Life is messy. Life is chaotic. You can keep it from getting out of hand if you build the habit of cleaning up after doing each thing. Work to train your family to do this too.

If you're a chronic leave-it-out-er, this will take a lot of effort until you realize that you can work cleaning-as-you-go into your life just by changing some really simple 5 second things.

Cleaning as you go means the clothes end up in the dirty hamper (if dirty) or back in the closet/dresser drawers (if not dirty) as soon as you take them off. The thing that you can change is to always stand next to your clothes hamper while taking off dirty clothes and then drop them in. And always stand next to your dresser or closet while taking of clean clothes and then put them away while you have them still in hand.

This practice is both efficient and organizing. It is efficient because you have just saved yourself the effort of having to pick your clothes up again later. It is organized because you have put something in the correct place. (Yes, that is what organizing is.)

We are all at various stages of development and it takes time to form new good habits. Even those of us who think of ourselves as organized are still trying to improve the way we do things.

One change I recently made in my own life on the cleaning-as-you-go front was to make the effort to keep my kitchen sink and counters clean of grime, stains, and crumbs. For me this meant that I had to add a few small steps to my cleanup after meals. I'm already in the habit of loading the dishwasher immediately after meals, so after I do that, I take about 3 minutes to wipe down the kitchen sink and the counters. So far I really like how this has saved me from mad scrubfests over a dingy sink to remove 3-month layers of grime. I like my clean sink and counters.

Some things to which we can apply clean-as-you-go:

• Pay bills as you get the mail
• Close all documents and windows as you leave your computer.
• Record all purchases and do the subtraction as soon as you complete a financial transaction.
• Put away the craft supplies when you are done with your craft for the day.
• Put the books back in the shelf when you stop reading.
• Put the newspapers in the recycling bin (or trash) when you are finished reading them.
• Put the tools back when you are finished working with them or when you stop working on a project for the day.
  
• Put the hose back when you are done watering the lawn or washing the car.
• Put the game away when you're finished playing.

A wonderful thing happens when you commit to cleaning-as-you-go. The more I clean-as-I-go, the easier it is for me to recognize how I can make storage more efficient. I hate having to go five different places to put something away. I start thinking of ways that I can store things together that get used together.

Test

This is only a test. When implementing changes, sometimes you have to just try things out. You have to be willing to let yourself fail and "waste time" making mistakes. You have to plan in time for the testing, because hardly anything goes off without a hitch the first time you try it.