Am I a Towel Hoarder?? Lol

I'm this way with toys. I know that I have no room for them, but I am always still getting more and more. My kids rooms have exploded into the living room. Besides their rooms, the living room has a rocking horse, giant Barney doll, a play tent, about 100 board books, a toy vacume, 20 wooden puzzles, a giant noah's ark "dollhouse", a Mickey Mouse Clubhouse set, a tub full of small animals, games, crayons, etc. I keep a very clean home, it's just full of toys. Lol. I don't clutter or collect anything else, I just like my kids to have plenty to do.

My grandmother only had 4 children... each child had 4 towels, and each adult had 4 towels. The each also had 2 beach towels. The guest room had enough towels for 4 people to each have 2 towels (wow I feel like I'm writing an obnoxious math word problem). ANYHOW... that brings the total of "towels in use" to 44? Every 10 years or so, my grandmother would buy all new towels and keep the old ones for "rags". Things to knee on in the garden, wax cars, etc. Over 30 years... that's well over 100 towels. And that's just with kids in the house. Once the grandkids started coming, of course, more towels were bought for OUR use.

Each person also had 10 wash clothes (new cloth every day). She replaced those about every 5 years. That's over 360 wash cloths. Of course, they were also used for rags... and didn't survive very long. Maybe 100 were in the linnen closet at her death.

((all of this is assuming I'm doing math in my head correctly)).

We were much poorer than my grandparents. We only had 2 towels each, and about 25 beach towels (we grew up on the ocean) for the family. But we spent the summers with my grandmother. So the towel issue doesn't seem strange to ME at all. Towels to use, towels to use while others were in the wash, towels for guests to use, towels to place over furniture when kids are in swimsuits, towels to make pathways on the floor to protect the floor from drippy bodies, towels to wipe off the dog's feet, towels to make baby headrests out of, towels to make a dresser drawer a cradle, towels to use as hotpads, towels to use to protect things in storage, towels for sunbathing, towels to lay on the floor when dying one's hair, towels for lining tool drawers to keep them from rattling, towels to bundle up in front of the fire to brush freshly washed hair, towels to picnic on...

Towels, according to the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy are one of the universe's most useful things. I rather have to agree. We only have 4 bath sheets (at $80 each, that's all I can afford) and about 10 beach towels.

I don't have enough money to hoard things. If I did... I'd buy new lingerie every week. LOVE silk and lace. Nowhere near as useful, however, as towels.

Are you sure you only do that with towels? Yes, you are obsessive about towels.

Just the fact that you are asking the question makes me think that perhaps you are still in control but if you need help, a counselor could probably walk you back to your first known experience and feelings about towels or grandma or something. If not, you may have just inherited a gene from gramma that is a bit compulsive. There are meds for that.

Nice that you have a sense of humor about it and aren't defensive. Sounds like you'd be a fun person to know.

My poor mother, God bless her soul (she passed away in July at the age of 67 from complications from leukemia), was like this about damn near everything. She had to have at least 20 of everything and often times more than that. She bought everything in bulk. Every time she went to the store she bought more of stuff she already had. Often it was stuff that eventually you will use, but really, who needs 25 things of hand soap at one time? Or 48 boxes of Kleenex? Or 30 huge bottles of Tylenol, Motrin, etc.? I could go on and on. Don't even get me started on the shoes and purses. They number in the hundreds. I used to tell her she would be better off taking the money she spent buying shoes and putting it toward buying stock in a shoe company.

One time when she was gone on a trip I decided to go through her pantry. It was so full of non-perishable food items that you could not fit any more in there and could not see everything that was in there. Anything that was close to the expiration date I donated. This included 10 cans of tuna fish, 6 boxes of gingerbread mix (when the hell was she going to make all this gingerbread?), and 12 jars of turkey gravy. There was stuff that had been sitting in there over 4 years. It did not matter, she just kept buying more. She never seemed aware of what she already had and it never seemed like "enough". Her claim was that she kept finding "great deals" and she "could not pass them up." but really, I think it was a disease. It was pathological. I think she had a compulsive shopping problem. It's like there was something inside her that was empty and she needed to fill in some way and shopping was how she did it. It was like she didn't know what else to do with herself.

So now we are faced with the unenviable task of cleaning everything out. It is overwhelming and it sucks. Every closet, every drawer, every place we turn, there's more, more, more.

No real advice here, just an example of how out of control it can get. My mom's home was always clean, it was always sanitary, and you were not in danger of being crushed by anything - you could sleep on the beds and sit on the couches and eat at the table. And it wasn't junk. But in my mind, it still wasn't healthy. She always talked about doing volunteer work, getting more involved in the church, etc. but never got around to it. Always claimed she didn't seem to have the time - but she always had the time to go to Costco 3 times a week. And now she is gone and all the stuff she accumulated is left behind. As they say, you can't take it with you. Or another saying I am fond of, "You never see a trailer being pulled by a hearse."

No judgement here, just some food for thought...

EDITED TO ADD: My MIL, for whatever reason, feels the need to give us towels as gifts every couple of years. So over time I've ended up with random sets of bath and kitchen towels and the kids will get a beach towel as their birthday or Christmas gift (really? You can't think of something better than the kids might enjoy more?). The ones I like I keep. The ones that I don't like, or start to get too worn, get donated to my work place to be used for pet bedding.

I hoard way too much. Built a pole barn 40x60 to hold some of the hoards. However, the worse is that I no longer teach full time, and probably never will because of my age, but I am not ready to dispose of my learning materials even to another teacher for I do not want that part of my life to disappear forever. If I get rid of most of it, then I no longer feel like I am a teacher.

Don't the towels get moldy sitting waiting to be washed once a month?

I say donate some to a women's shelter or an animal shelter, they ALWAYS NEED TOWELS!

where in the world do you put 75 bath towels? i have a pretty big linen closet, and it is FULL, and i only have 6 bath towels for us and 3 for my daughter! do you towels have their own closet? :)

i hoard glass bottles, i use them all eventually for various things, but at any given time i will have 7 unused ones in the pantry. Otherwise im pretty great about selling, giving away, donating, recycling things, i hate clutter.

I do have at least 25 towels and like 30 dishrags( and only the two bathrooms)

if ytou can walk through your house without having to step over dirty towels, or boxes of unused towels, i think youre ok

I tend to be a pack rat in general and have too much craft stuff and fabric. I use it to an extent but not enough to lessen the supply much. Also, we really have a lot of socks. They get separated in the wash and it can be a while before I round up all the unmatched ones and match them up again. My slightly compulsive friend washes her socks in a mesh bag in pairs and doesn't have this problem. I never managed to get that organized about it.

My grandma is a pack rat too but it is because she was a child/teen in the Great Depression. I think she could feed herself and half the family for months on the non perishable food in her pantry. She lives by herself in a huge house packed full of stuff and her kids are already arguing over who will clean it out after she dies. (She is pretty good health but turned 90 this year.)

Maybe you can work toward decreasing your towel hoard by donating the 5 oldest towels to an animal shelter. My kitty loved sleeping on the pillow I made her from an old towel. Repeat every few months or so until you supply is more reasonable.