I counted ours one afternoon after the room had been made and still looked wrong. Bed, sofa, two children’s beds, guest room. It came to 22, and 11 of them were on a floor.
That is most of why a house looks untidy in the middle of the day. Toys have a bin and shoes have a rack. A pillow has a bed, and for 16 hours a day the bed does not want it.
How Many Pillows A Bed Actually Needs
The bedding department layout is 2 large euros against the headboard, 2 standard pillows in shams in front, the 2 you sleep on in front of those, and a lumbar across the front. Seven. It looks right in the store because nobody sleeps in the store. At home, 5 of the 7 come off every night and go back every morning.
Only the 2 under your head have a job, and those get picked by how you sleep.
- Side sleeper: thick and firm, because it has to fill the gap between your ear and the mattress, which is the width of your shoulder.
- Back sleeper: medium, enough to hold the curve of the neck without pushing the chin down.
- Stomach sleeper: thin, or none.
A bed with 2 sleeping pillows and 2 in shams looks made, and it takes a minute to strip.
The euros are the first to go, since they are the biggest and they are the ones on the floor by midweek. If the headboard looks bare without them, a taller headboard fixes that once.
Where The Pillows Go During The Day
Every pillow that stays needs an address, an actual spot, because a pillow with no spot ends up on the nearest flat surface and the nearest flat surface is usually the floor.
- Bed shams stay on the bed, which means the bed gets made.
- Sofa cushions go in an open basket beside the sofa when someone is lying on it.
- The guest set goes in a cotton bag on a wardrobe shelf, not in the guest room collecting dust.
- Children’s pillows stay on the children’s beds, and the soft pile on the floor is toys, which have their own bin.
The corner chair is where this breaks down. It gets bought as a reading chair, becomes the pillow chair inside a week, then the clothes chair, and after that nobody can sit in it.
Put a bench at the foot of the bed and the pillows that come off at night go there instead.
A bench is flat, it is on the way to the door, and 5 pillows lined up on it look placed. The same 5 heaped on a chair look dumped. A storage bench with a lid is better again, since the pillows go inside and the bench is somewhere to sit while putting on socks.
Where A Body Pillow Goes In The Morning
A long pillow breaks the arrangement above, whether it is a body pillow for a bad hip, the U shape, or a pregnancy pillow for the months it is needed. At 5 feet long it does not fit a bench, a basket or a shelf, and in most bedrooms it lives on the floor as a pale horseshoe that gets stepped over on the way to the bathroom.
Three things work.
- Lay it along the wall side of the mattress under the duvet and make the bed around it. It reads as a bolster and never has to be lifted.
- Fold it in half and drop it in a laundry basket beside the bed. Five seconds, and the honest answer for a small room.
- Drape it over the arm and back of the corner chair. This is the one pillow that makes a chair look furnished rather than buried.
I would go with the first one in any room where the bed sits against a wall.
How Often To Wash A Pillow And When To Throw It Out
Nobody washes the decorative ones, and that is fine, they are not against anyone’s face. The sleeping ones need a protector, the zipped cover under the pillowcase that takes the sweat and skin so the pillow does not. The protector goes in the wash with the sheets every couple of weeks. The pillow gets washed every 3 months and aired on the line when the weather allows it.
A pillow in a protector lasts about twice as long as the same pillow in a case alone, which is the only reason I bother with them.
Fold a synthetic pillow in half and let go. If it stays folded, it is finished.
Two years is about the life of a polyester pillow slept on every night. Down and latex last longer. A pillow that has yellowed through its protector has usually failed the fold test already.
The long pillow follows a different rule. Its cover comes off and goes in the machine. The body never does, because 5 feet of wet polyester does not come out of a home washer in one piece and does not dry in a week. Hang it on the line in the sun on laundry day, and leave it out until the afternoon.