How to Manage Towels

Time required: Two minutes daily; one wash weekly
Equipment: Towel rail or hook, Laundry hamper, Two sets per person
Standard expected: Each towel dries between uses, smells of nothing in particular, and can be identified by its owner.

Few household articles ask less of their owner than a towel, yet a bathroom shared by several people will soon make a muddle of them unless each has a place and an understood proprietor. The object is to let them dry between uses, wash them before they grow stale, and keep the clean reserve where it can be found.

Method

Give each person a rail, hook, or recognisable colour. After use, spread the towel so that air reaches as much cloth as the fitting allows. A folded towel upon a narrow hook dries badly; hang it by the middle and open it out.

Wash bath towels after three or four uses, and sooner where the room is humid or somebody has been ill. Hand towels need more frequent attention because many hands visit them. Kitchen towels have a separate office altogether and should remain in it.

Wash towels with detergent at the temperature allowed by the care label. Use fabric softener sparingly, since a heavy coating makes fibres less absorbent. Dry them completely before folding. Stack by size with the folded edge outward, which lets the cupboard look orderly without requiring ceremony.

Keep one clean set available for each resident and a sound set for guests. Retire a towel when it has become rough, stained beyond recovery, or thin enough to admit daylight. It may serve afterwards as a cleaning cloth, plainly cut or marked to prevent social confusion.

Common errors

A damp towel left upon a bed or floor will become stale long before wash-day, while several towels crowded upon one rail prevent one another from drying. As for the embroidered guest towel which has hung untouched for years, it should either be issued and washed like other linen or removed from active service; the bathroom need not maintain a textile museum.

The Butler's RuleGive every towel enough rail or hook to dry between uses, and give every person a means of recognising his own; most household confusion on the subject begins with the absence of these two arrangements.