A Spoonful Of Sugar Helps The Medicine Go Down!

A Spoonful Of Sugar Helps The Medicine Go Down!  I am so proud of my linen cabinet/and/or napkins and tablecloths! My organized napkins and tablecloths!

Truly, I am.

Now, I fling open the doors and I don’t care who sees the inside of my linen cabinet….

In fact I want to show off my organized napkins and tablecloths! …

…..you know like being at the popular table at the school cafeteria!

I want to compose a poem in their honor.

I want to sing an aria about my organized napkins and tablecloths at the Metropolitan opera.

I want to leave the cabinet doors open all the time, just so I can look at my neatly stacked, color coordinated and organized napkins and tablecloths.

It hasn’t always been that way.

Usually, if I have a guest pop over unexpectedly and they are sitting at my dining table in my kitchen nook, …

…..and I have to get into “the” cabinet for a linen napkin,….

I pull the little-slip-to-the-side, slither-the-hand-into-the-cabinet and hope to pull out something resembling a napkin and hope it matches the sour cream coffee cake and everyday Fiesta ware cups full of coffee already sitting on the dining table. 

Alas, how embarrassing?

But no more! I finally completed the task of organizing my napkins and tablecloths….and it only took a few minutes out of my busy day!

Let me explain!  We have all looked at our linen cabinets or towel/washcloth cupboards or any place you have to get into often….and sighed and said to yourself,

“I have got to organize or straighten or find a new place to store those items”.

(Check out this storage idea on organizing wash cloths case you missed it: Clearing One’s Thoughts…)

You know what I am talking about?

And then you say to yourself, I will do that next time as I have such and such to do, etc….you can fill in the blank.

After all, there are more important matters of the heart to be accomplished. Lets face it….Organized napkins and tablecloths fall to the bottom of that list.

But let me tell you how I changed my P’s and Q’s on organizing my napkins and tablecloths.

A couple weeks ago, I sat up a tablescape and couldn’t find a particular set of napkins that I wanted to use.  AND that was because I had cloth napkins stored in several places in my home. After a quick search…and I do mean quick because I did not want to take the time to do a thorough search…I was too busy with several irons in the fire…I settled on a different set of napkins.

The second choice worked just fine, but it was not my original choice.  

I had this feeling of not being organized and it kept gnawing at me so I decided to do something about it….not that minute, but a couple days later… and I broke up the chore into two phases which was even better time-wise.

I went to every storage place that I had been storing linens and rounded up all my napkins and tablecloths and piled them on my cleared dining table.  

I knew I had a lot of different napkins, but I didn’t realize just how many I had, until I stared at the huge pile on the table. 

The first thing I did was to notice that several napkins had a different fold, so I made a mental note that after finding a storage place for all of the napkins and tablecloths….I would re-fold so that they would stack nicely….but that would come later.

My usual system is to remove the used napkins to the laundry room, wash and dry and fold and put away.  I decided a long time ago that I would iron the napkins/tablecloth just before using, as they sometimes got a bit mussed in storage, and who wants to iron them twice?   

The next step was to place the napkins/tablecloths in the original storage cabinet.  I wasn’t sure they would all fit, so I did not take the time to sort by color or refold them.  Remember, simplify and make this part of the chore go quickly, so I could get on with something else.

Strangely, they did fit….all of them in one place!  How did they not fit before? Napkins and tablecloths that had been scattered into 3 different places now fit in the linen cabinet that sits in the dining nook.

A few days later, I grabbed a cup of coffee and sat by the cabinet and removed the napkins, sorting by colors.  As I put them back in the cabinet, I refolded the ones that needed it.

As you can see below in the unorganized and organized napkins and tablecloths before and after pics, I actually had more storage room.  (The Captain said I now have room for more new napkins) hmmmmmmmm!!!