Hello and welcome to the week! Thanks for the feedback on the blogoversary last week! Amy B - I want to increase the amount I post, so fingers crossed I can pull it off! Today's post is short and sweet, but it's a little update on how we're continuing to live paper-towel-free. 

If you've been following this blog, you'll know that we strive to reduce our footprint, and one way we're committed to is eliminating paper towels and disposable cleaning cloths from our home. You might remember when I shared our under-the-sink organization a while ago, that I had divided up our cleaning rags into three basic piles: Dish towels, microfiber cloths used for dusting and mirror cleaning, and "unpaper" towels, which was just a stack of washcloths and rags to be used on everything else.

The problem, dear Watson, is that it turns out we have a lot of "everything elses," and I don't necessarily want to share a cloth between particular jobs. Maybe I want a different cloth between scrubbing tracked in-dirt off the floor and drying rinsed strawberries. Or between cleaning up paint spills and scrubbing the sink. In fact, it was when I saw Bret using one of the microfiber cloths, which I occasionally use to dust more than once between washes, to dry some produce, that I knew things had to change. We had already been having trouble at laundry time, when a bunch of cloths would land in a pile and no one would know what to do with them. My neatly organized bin started to look like this.

It turns out this was an easy project. I just sorted out all the rags into easily-identifiable piles, made labels (you know I go for handwritten and easy 98% of the time), and put them all back away.

I still use white cloths for our DIY Swiffers, but I realized that using white facial cloths in the bathroom was confusing, so I bought a stack of gray washcloths for exclusive bathroom use, and all white cloths are now for mopping. I also bought a stack of bright orange to supplement some rags I'd cut up, creating a big pile of easily-distinguishable cloths to be used for anything yucky or floor related. In general, we wash these and use again and again - that being the whole point - but if there was a mess that warranted dumping the cloth after using, it'd be an orange cloth we'd reach for.

For cloths that will touch food, to dry or wrap in the refrigerator, I cut in half a bunch of dishtowels we had. They're absorbent and, again, easy to distinguish from the other cloths. I hang them from an over-the-cabinet-door hanger that's actually meant for paper towels. They hang neatly from it and are handy to get this way. (I use paper bags to drain oil from fried food when that's necessary).

Originally, I had cut up a thrifted two-ply baby blanket to serve as paper towels; I've now relegated these for use only on painting projects and to clean our chalkboards, since they get pretty trashed and are unappealing in the kitchen after such abuse. And probably not that healthy, either. At least where paint is involved. The remaining thin dish towels I cut into scraps to use for waxing strips with my DIY sugar wax, or sent to Wesley's burp cloth bin.

Assigning cloths to a particular job is key. So is labeling them once you've done so, to eliminate confusion. My poor family will never keep up with my constant rearranging (I think of it as perfecting), but labels give them a fighting chance. I should have done this from the beginning, but waiting it out a bit did give me a chance to see just what we use cloths (and would use paper towels) for, and organize accordingly. How do you keep the toilet rags out of the kitchen? Enquiring minds want to know.

Thanks for stopping by!