Clutter Video Tip: How to Organize Linen Closets

Does your linen closet make you wish you were three sheets to the wind? Are you drowning in a pit of terrycloth despair? Don’t throw in the towel just yet. Watch this video for strategies to organize your linens and linen closet. You make your bed, and then you have to lay in it. So, don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater- get your linens organized, and sleep like a baby.

(Click here to watch on YouTube if you can’t see the embedded player. Or watch the video at http://bit.ly/TCDLinen.)

Transcript:

Hi. I’m Lorie Marrero, and today’s Clutter Video Tip is about organizing linen closets. Now, you may have a dedicated linen closet in your hallway, or you may have a small cabinet in your bathroom like this. Either way, most people want to ask me questions about sheets and towels. So we’re going to cover that today, and we’re going to cover that from the perspective of maximizing your storage space. Most people don’t have enough space when they’re asking me these questions. If you have plenty of space and you want to keep lots of blankets and towels, that is great. This is just a guideline, it’s not a hard and fast set of rules.

So with the sheets, it is an ideal number of sheets to have, two sets per bed. So, that’s all that’s really necessary. You’ve got one on the bed and one being washed. If you live in a cold climate and you want to have a set of the flannel sheets for the winter, obviously that’s great too. But just keep in mind, all you really need are two sets per bed. If people have trouble knowing what size the sheets are after they’ve been folded up, one of the things you can do to solve that is you can take a laundry marker and write a little “T,” “Q,” or “K” on every corner, standing for “twin,” “queen,” or, “king.” And that way you can just flip the corners up and take a look. This one has a “T” on it. And that way you know what size it is without having to unfold the entire thing.

So with towels, the ideal number is two sets per member of the family. That way, again, one can be used while the other is being washed. Obviously, people have their favorite towels. You might want to think about that. If somebody always is grabbing the red fluffy towels and they never use the navy ones or the green ones, you might have a lot of extra towels that are never being used. So if that’s the case, think about that. You can save some space and you can donate them to help somebody else in your community.

You know, also with towels, people ask me how to fold towels. And you know what? It doesn’t really matter. You know, I’m all about good enough. So, as long as you’re doing it consistently, that’s the important thing. Because you want to make consistent neat stacks that are easier to see and easier to manage. These are some that my husband folded. He does it a little differently than I do. But I’m not complaining because he’s folding towels. So we have them here, they’re neat stacks, and that is fantastic.

Now, some people use old towels and washcloths and things for cleaning rags. And if you do that, sometimes they can tend to get washed and re-circulated back into the good linens, and you don’t want that to happen. So here’s a little tip. You want to cut towels and things in-half, for one thing, so they’re, you know, an odd size. And then you can also take a laundry marker and you can mark a big giant “X” across the rag so that you know that’s a cleaning rag and it’s not going to get mixed back in with everything.

Now, a linen closet is the perfect size project to tackle with our free 7-Day Quickstart. You get access to our team of professional organizers for unlimited questions and you can find out more about that at clutterdiet.com/quickstart.

See you next time, and may you always be happy and grateful for having more than enough.

You may have been searching for how to to fold sheets and towels or how to fix a messy linen closet.

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