Decluttered: Linens

I finished my linens today. Though I'm glad to be done with that, I'm throwing in the towel on the bootcamp. Like I said before, I am cut out for the work that is going to be required to become a minimalist, but I feel like I must have victory over at least one area or I'm not going to be able to keep going. The motivation is not going to come when I open up the middle closet of Pete's office (where the linens are kept). The motivation is not going to come when I open up my junk drawer, since I never open the empty one. Get what I am saying? I'm not feeling very victorious at all because everything, seriously EVERYTHING, is chaotic around my home in terms of clutter. No one room has been tackled. There is no sanctuary to retreat to when I'm feeling completely overwhelmed - even though I have been working on the bootcamp for over a week. So, I'm going back to the beloved CCC - Colossal Clutter Cleanup - an old favorite.

I wanted so badly to love the bootcamp and I'm sure it would work well for someone who has hidden her clutter in drawers and cabinets throughout the house. Tanja is a fun writer and I like her blog topics. But she doesn't have a large family and let's face it, large families do things differently. I don't have my clutter all tucked away neatly. My friend at church does. Apparently she shoves stuff in drawers and closets. Mine sits out (and you saw the closet, so you know it does go deeper).

Anyway, she offers a refund if you aren't satisfied. While I hate to ask for a refund, I did, because honestly the method just wasn't working and $20 was a lot to pay for something that was not going to continue to help me. There is stuff on every flat surface of my house. Yes, I have minimalized junk drawers, personal care items, and socks - but none of those things were in sight anyway.

So, you are tired of hearing why I'm calling it quits on the bootcamp and now I'll reveal my pared down linens.

These are bath towels. Just bath towels. About 10 minutes after taking this photo and dividing everything up I found 5 more in another cabinet - for a total of 34 bath towels. There are 8 of us in the house. I think it's fair to say that we have too many towels. It's no wonder that I have trouble getting the children to reuse them and am constantly washing towels.

That's Brason holding a yardstick. Adding the 5 additional would have made this pile about 1 1/2 yards high.

Pile on the left are towels I am keeping in the house. Pile on the right is for the camper.

Kitchen towels. Pile on the left is for home. Pile on the right is for camper.

I was really perplexed as to how many towels to keep. After reading a couple of blogs about the subject here and here, here are the decisions I came to:

• 2 towels per person is more than enough. I will wash a load mid-week if necessary. (Funny story. After finally figuring out how many towels we should have I started splitting things up to find that I had various colored towels in pairs. Apparently this had already been decided at one time.)
• 1 towel per person in the camper is all that we can conceivably dry out each night while we are camping.
• 7 kitchen towels for the house. I will wash a load mid-week if necessary.
• 5 kitchen towels for the camper because I seem to use more of them there and they don't dry out as quickly in the smaller quarters.
• I had other towels, washcloths, and rags that I sorted through - kept what was needed, donated a few things, and trashed the others.
• I'm going to convert all of my kitchen towels to white towels at my next shopping trip. I love bleach. Don't hate me if you don't think I'm being very green or crunchy or whatever.
• I will transfer my house kitchen towels to the camper and ditch the camper ones.
• Eventually I would like to convert our bath towels to nice white towels. Maybe in January during a white sale or something. This was actually Pete's preference, we have just never done it.

I feel like I have accomplished something. I wish it were more and if I were doing this the CCC way, it would be. We are leaving for a camping trip on Thursday so I'm switching gears to take care of camper stuff and getting ready. I'll be making my CCC plan Thursday. For the record, I could have made it through real bootcamp - as long as they were methodical and organized.