Handy Home Hints - I

Okay, so I'm not Martha Stewart nor Delia Smith.   Normally I don't even venture into the land of handy household hints.  However I caved in to my personal gazingus pin about a week ago and purchased an Australian magazine called Notebook.

I reached the Home Life section and lo and behold there was a little informational section on how to select the best linen and have it last a lifetime.  I won't bore you with tales of thread count, sources of cotton or the ever increasing eco-interest in bamboo alternatives.  What did catch my eye enough to have me re-organising my linen storage was the suggested method of keeping all those pesky fitted and flat sheets together with their pillowcases.

I try, honestly I do. But somehow pillowcases decide that they don't want to stay with their sheets, or their duvet covers.  Sometimes they burrow down below a whole different set and hide amongst the florals and bows.  Don't laugh - I added that for artistic exaggeration - as you will know I am the least flower and bow type person you're likely to meet.

So here are the little gems that I picked up and implemented:

• Three sheet sets are all you need for each bed in the house: one on the bed, one ready and waiting in the cupboard and one in the wash.  The same applies for towels.


• Keep sheet sets tidy by folding one pillowcase and the fitted and flat sheets into a small square the size of half a pillowcase and then slipping them into the remaining pillowcase.  This way, king, queen and even single sets are folded to the same length and width, just a different depth, and can easily be stacked.

Okay don't laugh.  It's simple, it's obvious, but it didn't occur to me to keep everything together in a pillowcase.  I have used the same methodology with our duvet covers and matching pillowcases.  I'm sure it will be a vast improvement over the hit-and-miss storage in a box that I was previously using.  It may even weed out some useless and lonely singletons that should be put to other uses or, better yet, chucked out.

Just so the lovely folk at Notebook don't get the hump with me reproducing this snippet here - here's their website for you to visit and browse.  No doubt there will be lots of other nifty ideas to implement around the house.

And for those of you who may be unfamiliar with the term gazingus pin, let me introduce you to Your Money or Your Life.
The definition of a gazingus pin is:

A gazingus pin is any item that you just can't pass by without buying.

Magazines fell into the gazingus pin category for me pre-YMOYL.  You know how tempting they are at the supermarket checkout - pictures of lithe, sporty women on the fitness magazines; pristine, pretty, tidy rooms on the House and Garden magazines.  How can anyone resist them?
Well, at nearly $10 a  shot now, they have moved into being occasional treats instead. Otherwise the Oh Waily household would be moving inexorably towards bankruptcy and a house full of piles of glossy magazines with tiny winding trails between the stacks.  Ah, to have averted the "old lady's house" syndrome.  ;)