Linen Closet Solutions

Andrew's always sending me little homemaking tips that he reads about on LifeHacker.

He'll send me easy bread recipes (I do actually want to try to make bread some time) and organization ideas and cleaning tips and a lot of other things. He usually tacks his own little note on at the end of his message. Something like, "This would be cool."

I suppose I could take his little "hints" in one of two ways.

The first could be translated as this, "It would be cool if you actually cleaned something." That has the potential to create hard feelings though and I don't think that he means it that way.

The second is more like this, "You're a hardworking stay-at-home mom and I think this would make your life easier. That would be cool." Making my life easier is always cool with me and this way my feelings don't get hurt, so I'll take it this way.

Today's tip is one that I haven't tried yet. It sounds like a good idea though, so I'll share. I'm just in no hurry to sort through all of my sheets and actually do this. I suppose I will do it as occasion arises. Usually when I wash the sheets I just dry them and put them directly back on the bed...but the idea is that when you take the sheets out of the dryer you fold them up and put them inside one of the pillowcases in order to keep the whole set together. That way you have a nice little package in your linen closet instead of letting the pillow cases and sheets drift apart.

And while we're in the linen closet, my friend, Crys, just posted about rolling her towels instead of folding them...I just tried it because my linen closet is, also, always a disaster. I can now fit twice as many towels in. Seriously, where I had two I now have four. It worked wonderfully.

I often do that with my burp cloths so I don't know why I didn't think of doing it with towels. I guess just because my mom folded her towels, so naturally I had to fold mine, too.

How I fold my onesies

Before Rachel was born, I washed a lot of her clothes. Most of her clothes are hand-me-downs from my sister's twins, bestowed upon me in giant garbage bags. They were mixed and mingled with little fistfuls of grass and cookies, courtesy of the twins, I'm sure. They needed to be washed.

So I washed all the itty bitty items, all billion and one socks, every little onesie. When they came out of the dryer, I was in ecstasy folding baby clothes and imagining what our little baby was going to be like.

The million and one socks got stuck inside bigger items I had in the wash and I was picking them out of my t-shirts for weeks. I learned quickly and bought a mesh bag with a zipper. We wash and dry her socks in that now. None get lost in my pant legs anymore.

What I couldn't figure out, for the life of me, was how to fold a onesie. For months I experimented with different techniques, none of which seemed to work. I folded them, I rolled them, but mostly I ended up just shoving them in her drawers. It was rather frustrating for me.

Then Rachel got to a very awkward stage in her growth where she was either too big or too small for all of her clothes. I was forcing her just-born onesies to stretch over her not-so-just-born self in order to keep her from tumbling right out of her clothes. I had 3 0-3 month onesies and it took Rachel about 2 hours to go through that many onesies back in the day.

And so I borrowed some onesies from Kim, which I do need to round up and return. When Kim gave them to me they looked pristine--not a wrinkle in sight! They were folded simply in half at the tummy and stacked on top of each other. I was amazed!

That's what I do now--I fold them in half and stack them in Rachel's dresser. It makes them easy to riffle through, although I'm not sure that they look quite as elegant as Kim's folding job. (I may just have to bust out my iron before returning those onesies, Kim!)

Did anyone else have that same problem, or I am the only onesie-folding challenged among us?