If you're like most people, you probably don't ever think about all the towels and sheets you have.
And why would you? For most people, the only time that question might ever come up is when they've acquired some new sheets or towels, and decide to stow away the old ones in case you might ever need to use them again. Say for when you might have guests stay over at your place.
If you're like most people, after a long period of time, that dynamic almost certainly explains why you can never find empty space in your linen closet or wherever else it is you keep your additional towels and sheets, because that's where all your old ones have ended up!
Knowing how many towels and sheets you really need can not only help solve your clutter problem, it can also help keep you from developing a clutter problem in the first place. Fortunately, there are professional organizers who have thought long and hard about this problem, where they have a rule of thumb you can go by to keep your numbers of towels and sheets at manageable levels.
Professional organizer Korinne Kubena Belock is the founder of Urban Simplicity. She has helped to organize political campaigns but also clients' spaces and lives....
"Count the number of members in your family. Count your guest rooms. Multiply it by two. And that’s how many towels and sheets you need. So you don't need 60 towels for a household of four," Belock said.
We've built the following tool so you can quickly determine how many towels and sheets you need in your house. Just enter your number of household members and the quantity of guest rooms you might have, and the tool will tell you how many sets of towels and sheets you need. If you're accessing this article on a site that republishes our RSS news feed, please click through to our site to access a working version.
The tool's results are based on a rule of thumb, which may or may not make sense for your specific needs. Take the results and use them as a starting point to consider what the right number of towels and sheets to have is for your household.
Having gone through this exercise, you're now much less likely to have or to continue having a clutter problem in your linen closet, provided you act to make appropriate adjustments. If you still do, because you've thought about it, at least you can now probably express a coherent reason for why you do, which others will find rational. If not, then you likely have a very different problem than just a cluttered linen closet.
Image Credit: Photo by LumenSoft Technologies on Unsplash