Now, our house has exploded into chaos with four teen/preteens who seem to carpet their respective rooms with everything they can get their hands on. Clothes and towels have become the new carpet in their opinion. Cleaning their rooms mean shoving everything under the bed or in the closet. The four hooks in the bathroom are always left empty. I got tired of opening the cupboard to find there were no towels, yet walking into the laundry room and finding TONS on the floor. It was never-ending and equally frustrating...
So, after watching my older son be particular about the towels he picked (the towels had to match - either solids or stripes, mixing and matching was NOT allowed, beach towels were not OK to use after a shower but OK to use at the pool) and watching the youngest have piles of once-used towels on the floor that then became a bed for the dog - I had an epiphany: Color Coding.
Everyone now has their own color. Two bath size towels each for starters. If yours are wet and you didn't hang them up after your shower, your fault. If they end up on the bathroom floor, it's clear who's responsible. It also makes it easy to identify on the road or poolside (when we branch out into more towels) and eventually, the kids might actually be able to take them on with them when they move out...
The kids got to pick out their own colors (adults ended up with the whites we already had). Fortunately, there was enough of a rainbow of choices that no one wanted the same color. And to help, our bathroom is white with color accents, so coordinating, though not the primary concern, still was achieved. Win-Win!
Color has always helped me organize in my classroom with the variety of students, but extending it into my own home was always a challenge. Getting everyone on board was tricky - but no teenager wants to walk through the house naked, so that's a big motivator to comply with mom's BRIGHT IDEA!
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