The 1 Simple Hack That'll Make Changing Your Bed Sheets 1000% Easier

I loathe changing my bed linens — and it's got nothing to do with folding sheets or replacing duvet covers. No, it's because somehow, no matter how confident I am when beginning to wrap a fitted sheet on my mattress, I always, always get it wrong. Here's how the process usually devolves:

  1. Unfold fitted sheet, inspect its dimensions, and locate the long side.
  2. Secure first corner, the bottom left, in place.
  3. Attempt to cover the next corner, the top left, but don't have enough slack.
  4. Realize, despite visual-spatial aptitude, it's on wrong.
  5. Repeat steps 1-4 no fewer than three more times.
  6. Finish securing fitted sheet, then need to sit down to catch breath.

Turns out, there's a "why didn't I think of that?!" solution courtesy of home textile brand Lime & Leaf, which just launched a new "Make It Easy" bedding labeling system that solves one of the biggest headaches associated with using freshly laundered sheets: "orienting the bottom sheet to the mattress on the first try, every time," promises Lime & Leaf's founders, Kari LePage and Lori Morris.

Lime & Leaf

Each of the clever line's fitted sheets includes a prominent cloth label reading "END" at both, well, ends so you can finally distinguish them from the long sides! "No more guessing or flipping around," they told POPSUGAR. Genius, right?

For your existing sheet sets, it's an easy enough hack to DIY. You can sew a small cloth swatch to each end as a reminder or discreetly mark the ends with a permanent-marker dot — it'll be hidden under the mattress, so no worries about it being visible. If you want it even more foolproof, denote each corner with its exact coordinates (BL for bottom-left and TR for top-right, for instance).

Lime & Leaf's new "Make It Easy" collection has two other tips to help make the bed-making experience less terrible:

01
Label Sheets by Size

Label Sheets by Size

Lime & Leaf's designers vanquished the problem of distinguishing between king, queen, full, and twin bed linens by providing a two-inch easy-to-read sturdy cloth label on each sheet, with the initial letter of each sheet size — K, Q, F, or T — so prominent that it can be quickly spotted and easily read by everyone from kindergartners to grandparents. As with the fitted sheet orientation, you could do a similar DIY version of this, even color-coding (adding a small red swatch for king sheets, a blue swatch for twin sheets, and so on)!

02
Store Sheet Sets Inside a Pillowcase

Store Sheet Sets Inside a Pillowcase

For those with a packed linen closet, it's a struggle to store sheet sets in a way that removing one won't cause the rest to fall out. "No one seemed to have a good storage system to include all scattered sheet pieces in one set, so we've designed our pillowcases to become envelopes for the entire set," Kari and Lori advise. This single bed sheet bundle, coupled with the aforementioned labeling system, makes it even more clear what's what. Read on for a step-by-step storage guide and what the finished "package" looks like.

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