5 Tips for Organizing Your Vacation Rental Linens
You’ve done all of your research and selected quality linens for your short term rental guests.
Now, it’s time to start organizing your vacation rental linen closet.
Not only will it help you keep up with your inventory but it will also help your cleaners more easily access the linens when cleaning your vacation rental.
Organizing your linens will help both you and your cleaners easily see where everything is.
It will also help spot when you’re running low on inventory.
The goal is for your cleaners to have easy access to what they need, when they need it.
When selecting a linen closet, we recommend, if possible, choosing a closet that will fit all of your linens in one place.
It should be locked and only accessible to you and your cleaners. We’ll cover why later in this article.
Here are 5 things you should keep in mind when organizing your vacation rental linen closet.
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Based on the size of your closet, purchase the appropriately sized bins or containers to store your linens.
Use the larger bins/containers for the fitted and flat sheets, each labeled by bed size, i.e. King, Queen, Full, etc.
In the smaller bins/containers, place the pillowcases (King or Standard) and towels (bath, hand & washcloths).
Make sure to label everything!
It makes life so much easier, for both you and the cleaners.
We have this label maker for all the houses and it has helped a lot — we highly recommend it.
We’ve used it to label the bins, kitchen shelves, and light switches, hot & cold on the kitchen faucet. Basically, once you have a label maker you see reasons to use it everywhere. 🙂
The label maker gives you a clean way to provide information to guests and the cleaners.
The inside of the short term rental linen closet’s door is a great place for the cleaner’s Instructions.
They don’t get in the way, and the cleaners can easily refer to them when they need to.
The instructions can include where to place the towels for the guests, how to set them up in the bathroom and the placement of the toiletries, etc…
In our vacation rentals, we print the instructions and then laminate them before posting them to the door.
We laminate all the signs we put up. It gives them a finished look and also allows them to last longer.
In our previous post, 7 Tips For Keeping Your Vacation Rental linens Beautiful, we go over ways to handle stained linens.
We also suggest assigning a red laundry bag labeled “Stained Linens”.
In our experience, it’s common practice for cleaners to throw out stained linens.
To prevent that, we ask our cleaners to simply place sheets or towels with a tough stains in the red laundry bag.
That prevents linens from unnecessarily getting thrown out.
It gives us the opportunity to treat the stain with a spot cleaner. 95% of the time, we can get the stain out and put the sheet or towel back on rotation.
Every once in a while, we still have linens that go unaccounted for, but this system has helped reduce the frequency of linens disappearing.
Following this process, has given us a better handle on the linen inventory and saved us literally hundreds of dollars.
Compartmentalizing everything in your short term rental linen closet helps both you and the cleaners get a birds eye view.
It also sends a message to the cleaners that you are organized and able to keep track of things. 🙂
Once you finish setting up your linen closet, do a quick inventory.
Try to keep 2 sets of everything. This way, the cleaners will have plenty of back-ups.
We also have a hard set rule that once the house has been cleaned and ready for the guests, all unused linens must be placed in the locked linen closet in their respective bins.
Linens can get misplaced if left in an area guests have access to. The replacement costs can start adding up pretty quick, so it is essential to keep control of your linen inventory.
By organizing your vacation rental linens in bins and labeling them in the assigned linen closet, it encourages your cleaners to put everything back where it belongs and keep everything neat.
These same systems can be used in your other closets, such as the supply closet.
The more you’re able to keep things organized in your house, the easier it’ll be for cleaners or handyman to do their work, and the smoother your vacation rental business will run.
Newer houses that were designed to be a vacation rental will often have owners closets that were part of the house’s floor plan. If so it removes the guess work.
We have a vacation rental that was built as a vacation rental but it has a super tiny owners closet… I guest the builder never owned a short term rental. LOL!
We ended up using two closets as owners closets, one was strictly for linens and the other is for all the different back-ups of things. Remote controls, dishes, towels, light bulbs – those kinds of things.
One was a large closet in a bathroom, if you think about it, who needs a closet space in a bathroom when they’re on vacation?
The other closet we used as an owners closet was the large hall way closet. Again, how much of a need is there for closet space in the upstairs hallway?
Of course the larger the house, usually the easier it is to find a closet to dedicate to your stuff. If your STR is a studio, it’ll be much trickier to find space for your stuff.
We have lock boxes installed out of site in the HVAC closets. Both lock boxes only have the keys to the linen and supply closets.
We have two lock boxes, it’s important to have a backup. That way, even if the cleaner misplaces a the copy of the first set of keys there’s still another pair in seperate lock box with a different code.
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