To look at my room as a child - or even my dorm room as a college student - you’d never believe that I could one day become an out-and-out neat freak.  I was a terrible slob, and not just in my own space.  I wasn’t particularly good at leaving the kitchen or bathroom clean either, much to my parents’ frustration.

But now, I love to have a clean house.  Perhaps I’m shallow or need to get another hobby, but I get immense satisfaction from relaxing after having cleaned up the place.  And I like to do it myself - cleaning services just aren’t as thorough as I am.

My favorite cleaning implement are paper towels.  I’d much rather use those than a pre-moistened wipe or sponge.  Granted, there are some places where they just don’t work - such as the inside of the toilet bowl or while scrubbing grout - but I haven’t found a better all-purpose cleaning tool yet.

So it’s not surprising that I was happy to check out a sample of Bounty paper towels (even though I’m a Viva devotee) and write a 100-word essay over at Bounty’s One Sheet Challenge.  One hundred words is not enough to express my love for paper towels and all the ways in which I use them, so I had to settle for describing the weekend morning post-waffle clean-up.  If I had been allotted a thousand words, I could have gone on and on about my obsessive need to wipe the kitchen counters at least three times a day, spot-cleaning spills on the kitchen floor because I hate dragging out the mop and bucket, wiping fingerprints and noseprints from the storm door, my never-ending battle with the soap scum on the glass shower door, and many many more.

But the most all-encompassing reason for my love of paper towels is that they minimize the spread of germs even without using anti-bacterial cleaners.  Because paper towels are disposable, unlike a kitchen sponge, they are used on a single occasion and discarded.  Therefore, germs don’t get a chance to multiply between uses.  If you do use a kitchen sponge for wiping your counters, you should put it in the microwave regularly to kill those remaining germs (but I’ll bet most people don’t do that).

If you go to the One Sheet Challenge and tell of your own love for paper towels, you could win all sorts of goodies - a year’s supply of Bounty paper towels, a kitchen appliance upgrade (worth $8K!), or an entire kitchen renovation (worth $30K!).  Personally, I’ve been dreaming of granite countertops, so I’m going for the grand prize myself.

But I certainly won’t balk if they want to send me cases and cases of paper towels instead.