Bestest Friend and I are doing a blog project. Each day we will write a blog post on a pre-determined theme chosen by a random noun generator. The theme for the twenty-eighth day of the month is "Meaning."
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Suzanne recently wrote a post about how to wash your face and it was fascinating to read about everyone's habits. I came away from that post with a lot of questions about other people's linen closets.
We have eight bath towels, eight hand towels, and a gazillion washcloths. We also have four bath towels that have basically become towels for pet-related needs. Remember that my husband and I only do laundry once a week. It is rare we use more than half of our bath towels every week (two for each of us since we reuse our bath towels), and we almost never replace our hand towels during the week, so we generally only use two of them a week (one for each bathroom). But I use a different washcloth almost every night when I wash my face.
We very occasionally have a houseguest (TJC!) and so we have enough towels for when that event happens, but this seems like plenty of towels for two.
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| These are washcloths designated for just the upstairs bath and are exclusively used for me to wash my face. |
We have one set of queen-sized sheets for our blowup mattress.
We have two beds in our house, one in the guest bedroom and one in the primary bedroom. They are both full-sized beds. (Yes, we have a full-sized bed. No, I don't want a bigger one.) We have three sets of lightweight cotton sheets and one set of flannel sheets. We have a gazillion pillowcases because people insist on giving them to us as gifts.
This is enough for each bed to have a set of sheets on them and a spare in case of an emergency.
Seems okay for two people, right?
Here's where I fear we differ from the rest of the world. We have dozens of kitchen towels. Dozens. We use probably three or four kitchen towels a day. Because of the cat's new counter surfing behavior, anytime a kitchen towel touches the counter, we assume it has cat litter on it and we need a new towel. This is probably excessive, but my husband's food-related neuroses are not to be trifled with, so this is our lot.
We have so many blankets. Our linen closet is actually pretty well-organized until you get to the blankets section. People give us blankets for gifts. We each have blankets that are sentimental to us. It's just out of control. I think of myself as a semi-minimalist, but that "semi" part is doing a lot of work in our blanket situation.
Here are my stats:
ReplyDeleteBath towels - we go one week between washings. We have 8 towels for 4 people with a few extras plus beach towels.
Sheets - we have two sets per bed with some random old top and bottom sheets. I wash our sheets once a week, I don't ask/don't tell how frequently my stepsons change their sheets - that's between them and my husband. Less frequently than once a week but I don't think it's anything scandalous.
Kitchen towels - you and I are aligned. You can never have enough.
Blankets - we've got "enough". My quality of life depends on having a nice blanket to snuggle up with on the couch and in my office.
We don't wash our sheets weekly, although I've heard we should! We're pretty lucky if we do them every three or four weeks. LOL. Don't turn us in the hygiene police!
DeleteThere is a fleece blanket that lives on our couch and a handmade quilt on our loveseat. If you want a blanket in our house, there's never one far away!
I have tons of kitchen towels, but that's because I like a pretty and seasonal dishtowel to hang on the stove, and then I have a stack of unpretty ones in the drawer for utilitarian use. So I have stacks of pretty ones and stacks of unpretty ones, and I swap out the pretty ones with the season. Since we just moved and we had sets of linens/ towels here, and also from our old house, we have a ton. I use hand towels to dry my face, and so do my kids - we don't use washcloths, I might have to do a whole post on this as well - and we swap those out daily. Those are one use things, but the bath towels probably get washed every 2-3 uses.
ReplyDeleteYou have ZERO washcloths? How does that work? Aren't hand towels unwieldy for washing your face? Please elaborate, either here or on a separate post of your own!
DeleteThis is going to have to be a separate post but the tl;dr is that I use my hands to wash my face - so does the rest of the house - and so the hand towel is just used to dry it. I do have a couple of washcloths but they sit, unused, in the cupboard.
DeleteOkay, but how do you wash your body in the shower? Do you have a loofah or something? This is FASCINATING.
DeleteBar of soap! Just bar of soap, lathered all over my body. I do have little crocheted scrubbies that I use with a sugar scrub to, um, exfoliate the bikini area, and those are changed out after every shower.
DeleteWe have probably ten bath towels--the very large kind. As far as hand towels, I would say a dozen, and probably that many washcloths. I use a scrubby/loofah thingy in the shower, but I wash my face with a cloth. I really need to go through my kitchen towels because I hate when the centers of them get dirty-looking, especially when they are white or predominantly white. I just bought a few new ones, and I must have at least a dozen or more. Kitchen dishrags--I knit those, and I have about a half-dozen currently. I have to admit a fondness for Clorox disinfecting wipes in the kitchen. I have three sets of sheets per bed and one set for the futon.
ReplyDeleteThis doesn't include inventory for the lakehouse.
Okay, I have so many questions about the scrubby/loofah thing in the shower. I have tried them in the past - they are reusable and don't need to be washed, so they're environmentally friendly! But how do you prevent them from getting gunk all over them and starting to smell? How do you care for these things?
DeleteI've never had a problem with my loofah getting gunky or smelly. It's one of those nylon mesh thingys. After I scrub off, I hold it up to the shower and let it rinse thoroughly, then hang it on a hook in the shower to dry. I have a curtained shower, and I let the curtain open until the shower is completely dry. I use a moisturizing Olay body wash.
DeleteWe re-use bath towels and wonder why everyone doesn't, but it is anathema to some.
ReplyDeleteFor sure! My late MIL washed every towel after every use. It was delightful going to her house because we felt really spoiled!
DeleteWait. You sleep in a full size bed?? Ack! My husband and I have a king. I've thought about going down to a queen, but I'm not sure we could handle that- I need a lot of space.
ReplyDeleteMy daughter insists on a clean towel every time she showers (sigh.) My son used to be like that, until he went to college and started doing his own laundry, HA! Now her reuses his towel, probably too much. And my husband and I reuse our bath towels several times. I do laundry much more than once a week, so I just go through and grab any towels that are getting a little too old.
I also have a lot of kitchen towels, which I was intrigued to hear you keep in the linen closet. I keep our kitchen towels and cloth napkins in the kitchen. But now that we got new cabinets (yay!) I'm trying to organize everything in the most logical way, and I haven't decided where the towels will go yet. I'll have to think about this concept of putting them in the linen closet!
Sleeping in a full size is my worst nightmare when we're on vacation. We bought a king about 6 years ago and it is LIFE CHANGING. Even a queen is pretty rough for me. I love having a lot of space. We can cuddle and then go our separate ways when it is time to sleep. One of the best purchases of our marriage for sure (and also handy if we have a sick kid that needs to snuggle in with us; doesn't happen often, and honestly the king doesn't feel big enough with an extra body in there, but it's a whole lot better than when we had a full!)
DeleteYes, full bed. I am convinced that a larger bed will mean our marriage is in trouble. I'm so confused by people who need more space. We are two normal(ish) sized people and this allows us to cuddle easily, but when we need to cool down or whatever, there's plenty of space for each of us to go to our side of the bed. We are the ONLY two who are ever in our bed though - no children or pets allowed. I do see how it would be different if this were not the case.
DeleteWe have a drawer in our kitchen with kitchen towels, but not all of them fit in there, so halfway through the week we restock kitchen towels out of the downstairs bathroom linen closet.
It likely doesn't come as any surprise that I don't have enough of many of these items. I'd say we have 8-10 towels total for 4 people and that includes our guest towels. We reuse our towels ~3 times between washing (more or less depending on how they smell).
ReplyDeleteI have two fitted sheets for each bed (we don't use top sheets in our house).
I think we have 4 face clothes total, but those are mostly for guests since we use loofas in the shower and I use microfibre makeup removal clothes...and the rest of the household doesn't really wash their face.
We have 7 hand towels for 3 bathrooms. I rotate these out 2-3 times a week. We wash our hands a lot! I never, ever dry my face because the microfibre clothes don't drip water, so my face isn't really "wet" when I wash it.
I have 3 kitchen towels total and this is NOT enough. I am always running out and it's quite ridiculous I haven't purchased more. #Underbuyer
Blankets - each kid sleeps under a blanket (no top sheets, remember!), and then we have probably 4-5 fluffy throw blankets + 2-3 quilts. I love a good fluffy blanket. We have a big basket by our TV and those blankets get used basically anytime we sit down to watch a movie. It makes the whole experience so much cozier...
My cousin only has a few kitchen towels, too. I started buying her two or three as Christmas gifts a few years ago, but she told me that they're so nice she won't actually let anyone use them! They're just decoration! This year I'm going to go to Target or someplace and get her a giant pack of boring ones! I do not think I could function in a kitchen without a gazillion towels. Frequently we each have one slung over our shoulders, there's one hanging from the stove and one hanging from the fridge door. Your three kitchen towels is making me twitchy!
DeleteGirl! I hear you about bed size. We had a full when we first got together and have just moved to a queen... and I hate it so much. Spouse is tall and twice my size, so he really needed a bit more room, but I miss the coziness of a full!
ReplyDeleteI'm a bit of a maximalist with the house linens. Especially with towels because kids and spouse frequently won't reuse bath towels (not even once!). On my own side of excess, I have seasonal bed linens for our bed--I like changing them up from summer to fall to winter to spring (sheets, comforter, quilt, and everything). But it brings me so much joy when I walk into our room at the end of the day and the bed is so beautiful.
We have made our bed peak cozy! The sheets are delightful, the duvet is lovely, and our pillows are perfectly tailored to each of us. I'm with you that walking into the bedroom with a lovely bed is the best feeling ever.
DeleteI basically had a hard time focusing on the rest of this post once you got me thinking about our bath towels. lol! I feel like we REALLY need to replace a bunch of our towels. We have 4 grey ones that my husband and I use and keep in our master bath, but then we have a decent stack in the kids' bathroom that are for them and/or guests. But most of those are kinda... tired. It bugged me recently when we had people in the house that I just feel like our extra towels are all getting on the shabby side. I think about it occasionally, "we need to replace some of these towels", but then out of sight, out of mind and I have not taken any action on this...
ReplyDeleteWhere do you store the kitchen towels until you're ready to wash them?? What about "wet' cloths like a rag you've used to wipe down the counter, for example, if you then want to change that out for a fresh one after?
1. Last summer we replaced all our towels. Most of them we'd had since we'd been married (14 years) and they were falling apart and grungy. Usable, certainly, but not ideal. We bought new ones at Costco and I've been pleased with that decision. We donated all our old ones to the local Humane Society. It took us MONTHS and MONTHS to actually act on this, but I'm so glad we did.
Delete2. Used kitchen towels get thrown into a designated corner of our counter until they're reasonably dry and then we take them to the laundry basket in the downstairs bathroom. If they're still dampish, we hang them from the side of that basket instead of putting it directly in there. This has been a good enough system for us, although now I'm realizing that perhaps it's not ideal!
As I think you know, I LOVE this kind of topic. So fun to see how everyone does this quotidian stuff differently, but also the same!
ReplyDeleteMy parents are like you, by the way - no interest in a bigger bed. I however ADORE my king sized bed. It allows for cuddling but also I can be on my own side when my husband gets too hot. It's good for him, too, because I move around so much and get up so frequently. I think I would wake him up more if we had a smaller bed.
We have SO MANY TOWELS. I simply have a block when it comes to getting rid of towels; they are so useful! I have towels we got for our wedding in 2008. My husband and I both have towels we used IN COLLEGE (and, at least in my case, some of those towels were from my childhood). I have towels I inherited from my grandmother, towels my in-laws used when they were in our city part time and then no longer needed, two sets of guest towels. Two new sets of bath towels I bought when the towels from 08 started getting too threadbare. SO. MANY. TOWELS. I swap out bath towels weekly and wash them every couple of weeks (but could honestly go for several months without washing towels).
I also have eight gazillion kitchen towels. We have two towels hanging in our kitchen at all times: one for hands, one for hand-drying dishes. I swap them out every couple of days and wash them every two weeks with the bath towels. I like to wash towels separately from other items because I am weird.
I ALSO have an entire cupboard full of "rags" -- microfiber cloths, old cloth diaper inserts (very absorbent), old baby blankets I have ripped into smaller pieces. Those are used solely for cleaning and I keep them in a bag in the laundry room and wash them by themselves every week or so when the bag is full.
In and among all these towels, I maybe have a dozen total washcloths, which is a deficit I fully intend to correct.
You also mentioned bedding, and again I have TOO MUCH. Three sets of queen sheets for the guest room, two sets of sheets for the primary bedroom (plus three sets of flannel sheets; although I DID manage to donate one set recently in an effort to cull), three sets for my daughter's room. My husband and I have two duvet cover options; my daughter and the guest room have one. I have two blankets from when I was a kid; we have innumerable "baby blankets" my daughter got as an infant, that persist in our home, two large soft blankets on the couch in the family room for snuggling while watching TV, and two sports team blankets in the basement TV area.
I hereby publicly vow to cull the collection once we have moved; right now, I am using the towels as padding for delicate things.
Linens are so USEFUL when you're moving. But, yes, definitely cull when you are moved! We donated our old stuff to the Humane Society and it made me happy to know that our old linens were going to a good home and that we wouldn't be the kind of people with eight gazillion towels.
DeleteMy husband and I have never had a baby, yet we have lots of baby blankets, including my baby blanket and my sister's. Whey? Well, that's how family heirlooms do, isn't it?
I have never had a week where I've thought about my linens this much - I love it! We have an extra set of sheets for our bed and Lil Momma's, but that is it (and can use LM's on the air mattress we have for guests). LM has a blanket she sleeps with and a blanket collection in her closet; Luke and I each have our own comforters (his is 20 years old and a point of contention, haha). Our towel situation is not ideal; we have a set of 4 new towels I bought when we redid the bathroom, but I am the only one who uses those. LM uses 2 hair towels and a hot pink one from a raffle basket she won for her body. Luke uses the same yellow towel we bought when we moved into this house (almost 10 years ago) (I can't).
ReplyDeleteLook, I will not criticize someone for having older linens! We had 14 year-old towels until we got news one last year. I'm really fascinated by the fact that you each have your own comforter, though. Do you have separate beds?
DeleteI feel like we have a very minimal amount of all things in the linen closet. Like, one spare of each. We wash our bath towels once a week, bed linens every other week. I do not use a ton of wash cloth (I have a bath mitten, but I don't use that daily either).
ReplyDeleteWell, I guess if you don't have a lot of house guests, there's no need for spares, right?
DeleteOoh, I love these kinds of topics. Since I live alone, my linen needs are MUCH different but here they are:
ReplyDeleteTowels: I have two big towels that I use throughout the week and wash them every other week. I also have about 5-6 backup towels in my bathroom closet. Those tend to be used for emergencies, like when my toilet overflowed last week! Fun!
I have two hand towels but mostly just use the same one over and over again. I think I need to buy some more hand towels and swap them out more frequently, eeks!
I have SO MANY WASHCLOTHS. I have them all in a big basket under my bathroom sink. I use two per day for my skincare routine!
Sheets: I have two fitted sheets, six pillows/pillowcases, and a quilt. I wash these once a month. That's all I can handle and I don't care what it says about me.
Kitchen towels: I have about half a dozen of these and I wish I had more. I should also invest in more kitchen towels. I also need to be better at swapping these out more frequently.
Blankets: I only have two blankets, both of them gifted to me by Kim! <3 That's all I really need, though, since it's just me here.
I cannot imagine just half a dozen kitchen towels! Most days we go three or four!
DeleteWe have lots of towels and sheets; our has four bedrooms, four baths, so I have at least two sets of sheets for each bed (more choices for me) and gobs of towels for each bath.
ReplyDeleteI swap out our bath towels and hand towels at least twice a week, and washcloths daily. I also do laundry at least once a day, so stuff never piles up. Sheets are washed once a week.
I'm gonna have to glaze over the Full Sized Bed for two grown humans....😜😳
We also go overboard with the kitchen towels; they get swapped at least once a day.
I love reading how other people handle these daily parts of life.
Huh. I have a queen sized bed for just me, but I bet I could get away with a full, or heck, even a twin (I don't move much). Then again, my sheets are for a queen, so there you go. I have weird adaptive sheets, but have 2 of them, 2 top sheets, and 1 pillowcase I wash and reuse every week because it's silky and it's good for my hair, which is fragile and frizzy. Fun!
ReplyDeleteTwo sets of towels. Washed 2x/week. Washcloth in the shower, but only for my face, and only once or twice/week. Bar soap for body and face. No scrubby things. Am I the only one who uses bar soap? And I keep another washcloth by the sink, and use it to turn off and then wipe off the faucet. That's changed out every 2 days.
Dishtowels are changed Saturday, Monday, and Thursday. Cloth napkin Thursday and Monday. Can you tell I have routines? :)
(These posts are bizarrely fascinating...)