As a place to hang hand towels, refrigerator handles (normally vertical on U.S refrigerators) and oven handles each have their pluses and minuses.
Refrigerator handles: towel is pretty secure - it can fall off onto the floor, but is unlikely to. However, as you say, it’s all bunched and tends to stay damp.
Oven handles: you can spread out the towel so it dries out, but it slides off easily. And even when it doesn’t, if you open the oven all the way, the towel drags the floor.
So both places are less than ideal. We usually have one on the fridge handle, and once it gets damp, we toss it in the laundry basket, and get a fresh towel from the drawer.
We have a bar with hooks near the sink, so the kitchen towel for drying hands is there.
I’ll sometimes put a decorative towel on the oven handle. Currently there’s a towel with a Christmas tree hanging from the bottom oven, which I don’t use as often. I never hang anything from the top oven’s handle.
The fridge does not have a handle which could be used to hang something.
Dish clothes and towels are washed about every 3-4 days.
I have a towel hung on my oven handle, but it’s not for dishes, it’s there as a potholder. It’s a convenient place for it.
If I need a dishrag, I have some old washcloths that I keep under the sink, and I toss them in the wash after I use them. I never would have thought of hanging it on the oven.
We have always had a towel hanging from the fridge. But our new fridge had the freezer on the bottom, and if we aren’t careful, the bottom of the towel can get stuck in the freezer drawer.
This thread had given me all sorts of ideas!
No, vertical. And it’s fine. The towel is fairly large, and we mostly use it to dry our clean hands after washing them at the sink. And we just grab the loose part to do that, the part that is looped in the door never gets damp, let alone festering.
It’s very conveniently located for that, since the fridge is in easy reach of the sink, and you kinda have to walk past it to get from the sink to anyplace else. (except the stove, i guess. But really, it’s right there.)
Hmm, i could move the sieve and bottle brush that hang over the sink, put in a larger hook, and hang a towel there. Or in front of the sink (although that might get in the way of opening that door, and there’s all sorts of “dirty” stuff in there, like dish soap and the compost can.) Or stick a hook on the side of the fridge. Or… All sorts of possibilities.
We have a separate hook. I got a cute one from Anthropologie.
I tried the oven door, but I found it annoying when I actually used the oven – which is fairly frequently. Mainly, because if you opened the oven door, you’d have to take the towel off or it’d drag on the ground. Which, yuck. It also seemed to slip off more often.
We wash the kitchen towel and the hand towels from the nearby powder room about every 3 to 4 days.
Exactly what we have for the hand towel. The dish towel is on a rack screwed into the other door under our sink.
Neither our refrigerator or our oven is that close to the sink, so the towel going near the sink is the only thing that makes sense.
As for when we clean them, every time we do laundry.
I have a wheeled serving cart that generally lives under the counter next to the sink (before I moved here there was a dishwasher there.) I hang a kitchen towel from the (horizontal) handle of that.
I throw it in the wash whenever I’m washing something suitable, generally once or twice a week. If it gets grubby before I’m doing laundry, I’ll toss the dirty one onto the washing machine and take a fresh one, I’ve got several.
Yes, we’ve been here before. Cecil discusses, pointing out that the kitchen is, in fact, by far filthier than the bathroom (with a picture by Slug that is worth a thousand germs):
