Confess – don’t you find yourself curious about other people’s homes, how they live and all? Most intriguing is the stuff that isn’t on deliberate display. What exactly do they have in their medicine chest? What’s in that drawer, that box, that armoire? If you opened that closet, would it look like a closet organizer ad OR would a avalanche of god-knows-what rain down upon you?
So, here’s the challenge: pick some area in your house that is normally closed off from the sight of guest, take a picture, and post it for us. Show us the dire secrets of your fridge, the hidden splendors in your roll-top desk, that cabinet under your bar crammed full of jelly jar glasses mixed with cut lead crystal.
Clarity counts more than artistry in pix of this sort… and NO FAIR cleaning up before taking the picture!
I have a drawer in my bedroom. I’ve instructed my best friend that in the event of my death, he is to come over (he has a key) and dispose of the contents before anyone else has a chance to come in.
My fridge. The second shelf is mostly my husband’s condiments for his mexican-style creations, and that bowl in the middle is some leftover sweet and sour sauce. 'Bout time to throw that out. The bowl on the bottom with something vaguely cheesy-looking in it is just that… was used for nachos last week, I think. Most of the crap in there is fat free stuff that tastes like cardboard. I see a hint of vegetables on the bottom: some lettuce that looks like it’s a half hour past it’s prime, there is a plastic box of tomatoes and one of strawberries you can just barely see. They’re fresh.
The Guinness is mine.
The dreaded “kitty closet”. This is the closet door at the end of the hall that is always just opened a crack. The litterbox is here, on the bottom, after we searched for a solution to living in a small apartment with two cats who could often drop bombs a little too potent to keep the box in the dining room. We got that “Small Spaces” litter, and the smell is virtually nil. The closet itself doesn’t smell bad, but as you can see, it is where we throw tools, cleaning supplies, bags of bird seed, potting soil, air fresheners, extra soaps and crap that we had no room for in the bathroom, board games… etc. It needs to be re-organised.
My bathroom drawer. The one drawer my husband won’t deal with when he cleans the bathroom. It’s full of things he “doesn’t get”, or “doesn’t know what to do with”. As you can see, it’s just various shaving implements, bath beads, facial cleansing cloths, tampons, Instead, moisturisers… and yes, that is my little hardcover “Joy of Sex” book. You never know when you might find yourself unexpectedly confined to the toilet, and I’d like some good reading! It’s also quite funny to see how often it gets moved around as my husband tries to maneuver his way around “my” drawer, knowing there’s treasure in there if he can just find his way through the maze of girly shaving instruments and colourful tampon boxes.
All in all, pretty boring, really. My husband is pretty anal about keeping the place neat and tidy. If he saw that picture of the closet, I think he’d faint. I guess the only other place I don’t show off to people when they visit would be my “hidden” drawer in my pants dresser… but I don’t think I could post that… :o
No way am I showing anyone the parts of my house I hide. Probably the worst we have is the Bus Kid’s room, but since we have that under application as a Supefund toxic waste site, we have it restricted.
Not really. It’s pretty ubiquitous here in Tucson. That’s probably the last I’ll speak of it. If it were something I wanted everyone to know about, it wouldn’t be in my secret drawer! But thanks for playing!
The Fibber McGee Memorial Closet at Domicile Doug is home to the soprano and alto sax, clarinet, and flute portion of the Homer and Langley Collyer Collection of Woodwind Instruments, Ephemera, Detritus, Bric-à-Brac and Random Crap. The folded object at left center is a raincoat, which I wear on my frequent expeditions pushing a shopping cart and muttering.
My living room. I bought a new bike, and don’t have the heart to keep it in my garage, so it stays there so I can admire it until it gets dirty though. Why yes, that’s part of my new kitchen counter on the floor (remodeling very slowly)
The Intuition razor? I like it for my legs quite a bit, though recently my legs have gotten very picky and are drying out more than usual and I’m getting a red rash after I use it, despite careful drying and moisturising throughout the day. I might have developed an allergy to it (even though I use the hypo-allergenic refills). Which sucks. I like that razor.
Yeah, be glad I don’t have a camera. You guys would think I’m a mega super neat freak. Tiny college-issued room and not much clutter. Youuuuu guys would be shocked and promptly awed.
I may have to steal someone’s camera so I can inflict great amounts of cleanliness on the Dope.
(Okay, this is my first attempt at posting pictures, so be gentle if I screw it up.
OTOH, feel free to mock the pictures themselves.)
We start with an overview of a cabinet in my home office/study. No it doesn’t slope…clearly the photographer does. Anyway, so far it’s a reasonably nice cabinet with clutter piled atop it.
What kind of clutter? Well, here’s a better view of the top. A stack of pads of paper. Three boxes of one dozen colored gel pens. 3 hanging packs of 2 pilot blue gel pens each sitting on top of more pads and notebooks and such. That’s the front row. Those boxes on the back right? Drug rep crap, er, office supply themed give aways – there’s a wall clock from zoloft, a zoloft calculator, a rather nice ‘powered’ stapler from a forget who, other gizmos. The two big boxes in the center back? Crammed full of dozens and dozens and dozens of black ink ball point pens, advertising every psychoactive drug on the market.
But all that is nothing compared to the stunning secrets hidden in the interior of the cabinet. Guess who needs never fear running out of office supplies in the next, oh, five decades? On a casual survey I see four bottles of fountain pen ink (black, blue, peacock blue, purple), at least five packs of multicolored highlighters, several mugs crammed full of assorted writing implements, a chunk of quartz?, and a spool of fishing line. (Double ??? on that one.) Oh! And some packs of batteries! I guess I didn’t need to recharge the others. And that’s the first shelf. Below that – files, packs of sticky notepads, a blue container full of assorted occasion greeting cards, boxes of envelopes, tubs of miscellaneous smaller desk ‘stuff’. Oh, and that big envelope box in the center, half way down? That’s full of index cards. White ones, colored ones. Ones with regular horizontal lines, ones with grids, ones with vertical lines. 3X5 and 4X6. Ones with bands of colors, ones with solid colors. Hundreds and hundreds of index cards.
My hubby will no longer let me go into a Staples unescorted.
