Housekeeping Tip: Laundry, actually musty towels

A friend of mine recently posted about laundry. I know you're thinking, "Fascinating," but really it was quite funny. It reminded me that I have meant to do a post about towels. Now I am not a great housekeeper. My goal is one load of laundry a day and to make sure my baby (she's not toddling around yet) doesn't run out of pj's. When I get really behind on the laundry I'm lucky enough to have a husband who will do 4-5 loads throughout Friday night and Saturday to catch up.

But, I'm getting off track. This was supposed to be about towels, musty towels. First, I want to say that I know some people, especially those of my fans in the deserts of Southern Nevada may not have this problem. If you live somewhere that towels have trouble drying than you could have this problem. Recently, I spoke with a friend in Ely who told me that she only uses her towels once because then they smell a little. The last thing you want when you are clean from the shower is to use your "clean" towel to dry yourself off, but the towel starts to smell musty once it gets wet and then you dry yourself with a musty towel and you smell musty. We have fixed this problem in our household, so I thought I would admit the problem to the world and then share our solution.

To get the mustiness out of our towels we wash them in hot water, use vinegar (1 cup or however much fits in your fabric softener dispenser), and also add 1/4 - 1/2 cup baking soda to the detergent. Don't use fabric softener when you are doing this deep cleaning on your towels. Since we started doing this we haven't had musty towels. (We have a high efficiency washer so we use low amounts of the vinegar and baking soda.) The baking soda acts as a deoderizer and helps to soften the water.

Martha Stewart's website talked about not using fabric softener (FS) with towels. The FS coats the fibers and makes the towels less absorbent over time. We don't use FS any more (for towels) and we don't miss it. The vinegar also cleans out the residue that the FS leaves in the dispenser.