How to live without paper towel!

I'm almost positive that you can find paper towel in just about every house in North America. It's become a staple but I HATE it. Why? Well for starters it's never as absorbent as they say. Whenever I watch a paper towel ad on TV I'm constantly reading the find print at the bottom of the screen so I can point out how their experiment is bogus. So you end up using a giant wad of cash (essentially) to wipe up cat puke. The other reason I hate paper towel is that I can't keep a big enough supply in the house. I feel like I'm constantly buying paper towel and it lasts for all of a week. Even the gigantic Costco bales of paper towel never last as long as I think they should.

My hatred of paper towel grew to such an extreme level that I decided I was done. I wasn't buying it anymore. Which left me asking, now what? I obviously still needed something to wipe up those spills, pet messes, and to clean the house with. I was watching an episode of Clean My Space when it hit me; microfiber cloths!! Why had this never occurred to me? I had considered using tea towels, but they aren't very effective at cleaning and I don't have a massive stash of them.

So I headed out to Canadian Tire and bought a bundle of 15 microfiber clothes (similar to these - affiliate link). *Money Saving tip - look for them in the car care section, they are usually WAY cheaper there than in the home cleaning section! The cloths ended up working out to about $0.75 per cloth, which I thought was a great deal! The tricky part was figuring out how to store these bad boys. I knew that if I tossed them into our black hole of a linen closet I was never going to see them again. I also didn't want a vomit rag lounging amongst my laundry for the week waiting to be washed.

Dollar Tree to the rescue!! I picked up these colored bins, one for clean cloths and one for dirty and labeled them as such so there was no confusion and because I'm just a little obsessed with labels. I stuck them under my kitchen sink with the cleaning supplies and voila, my very own cleaning centre! Now I can use the cloths to clean up any mess I have, and when they get too dirty to use, I pop them into the other bin. *NOTE: Let really wet towels dry for a bit before tossing them in, or you'll have creatures growing in there! When the "dirty" bin gets full, I toss it in the wash with our microfiber mop head.

This system has been working extremely well for us. The best part? I will never have to buy paper towel again! Take that you evil, lying, Sponge Pockets!