So, let’s talk about toilet paper. It was very much in the news not three months ago, and now we hardly hear about it. How many of us have already slipped back into our old habits of not keeping more than enough to get us through to the next shopping trip?

Ever since we got caught with our pants down (seldom has an expression been more appropriate and inappropriate at the same time!) our household has vowed “Never again!” It’s not that we didn’t have enough on hand, mind you. It’s just that, because of everyone else panicking, we were forced to see just how long our supplies would last, and while it lasted close to a month, we were getting pretty darn close when the wheels of commerce ground to the rescue.

So what have we done since? Well, to start with we had to, like most of America, do be patient. Initially we could get more, but in limited quantites, and not in our usual brand. We were a bit dismayed to find that what we could get, while certainly cushier, was so thick that there was only about a day’s worth on a single roll, perhaps a little more. Just holding the line was a bit dicey.

But now that things are getting back to normal, our usual brand is available again and life is good. We also have about three different brands in our growing TP reserves, which we are building up slowly, so as not to appear panicked. And, sadly, some of that reserve still includes some of the one-day rolls. And with a variety of rolls still in circulation, it’s been difficult to measure just how much we’re using.

Solution? White board marker on the bathroom mirror! Every time we change a roll we record the date on the mirror. After a couple weeks we have enough data to start making estimates. It appears that we average a new roll every four days, +/- a day. Divide that into 365 days, and we need about 91 rolls of our usual brand to stock that bathroom for a year. We still need more data on the other bathrooms in our house, but I suspect that even combined they won’t use more than our main bathroom.

So all told, we probably would need 180 rolls to last us a year. Hopefully we would never need that much, but it’s not like TP is perishable. It’s easy to rotate (’cause it goes round and round on the holder, get it?!), so having too much isn’t really a problem, so long as we take our time building up that much. More likely we would start with half a year and see how that goes. But provided we have the storage space (we do) and are willing to keep track, we should be able to rest easy next time the cr– …. uh, the next time people start going crazy.