I bought my house in June 2009. To congratulate me, some friends and family gave me a $100 gift card to Home Depot for the stuff I never had a need for in an apartment - namely gardening supplies. Something very similar to this water-powered automatic hose reel was on sale for like $35-40, and I bought it. It was only $5 more than the non-automatic hose reel, and I HAD to have it.
Unfortunately, my main hose wouldn’t fit on it, since the female end of it had this giant knob that wouldn’t mate with the reel. Today, I finally went out and bought a repair kit so I could cut off the end and replace it with a reasonably sized end. I hooked it up, and watched in amazement as my hose reel (which been doing nothing for two years except collect vines) automatically reeled my hose in from across the yard. It’s absurd and ridiculous, but I love it. Which also guarantees that it will catastrophically fail by the end of the summer, and I have to go get a new one because there’s no way to just manually coil the hose with this thing.
I have two of them and absolutely love them. No more reeling up the hose and trying to make sure it coils nicely all while using my third hand to keep the whole thing from tipping over. I don’t have the model that runs the hose back and forth, so I turn on the reeler and then I’m free to use both hands to make sure it coils up nicely and quickly get out any tangles as they appear. If one of mine breaks, I’ll get the kind that has the thing that runs it back and forth. My 100ft hoses just barely fit if I make sure they coil. But more then one or two overlaps and it ‘bottoms out’.
Really? That’s the one thing not in my house that I really wish I had. Dishes pile up on the little counter space I have - I really miss my dishwashers of the past…
I know a bachelor who has two dishwashers. When one is clean, he uses the dishes out of it and places them in the other dishwasher until that one is full, then washes them and works out of that one. He says it save on cabinet space and he never has to put away his dishes.
I figured someone would be a yay-sayer – everyone I know loves them. But even good ones can’t get really cruddy stuff off pans, and they don’t sanitize flatware or anything else to FDA specs. Plus, they waste water, I feel.
I’d trade mine for one of those restaurant-style Hobart sterlilizers in a heartbeat. Or a maid with a cleanliness fixation who’s not afraid of bleach. Like the one from “My Name Is Earl” would be perfectly acceptable.
And that is one lazy-assed bachelor, coffee! I admire him, somehow.
First thing that came into my head too. I can wash the dishes by hand in about a tenth of the time, using much less water, and no additional electricity.
I sincerely hope my husband does not see this thread as that is the kind of thing he would consider brilliant. Along the the same line, I would say the most pointless things around our house are several mini-frigs used as end tables which contain beer, water, and sodas so lazy people do not have to walk to one of the two large frigerators in the kitchen to get something.
Our kitchen table. My wife and I eat in the living room as we have hardwood floors and an open floor plan. We also both have little tables for our laptops, so there’s a convenient surface. The table just sits there, occasionally being used as a flat place to put mail or briefcases.
My parents did that when they remodeled their kitchen. My mom’s got more plates than a Crate and Barrel, and most of them are pretty fancy. So, she had all her cabinets made without doors, to show off the nice tableware that they use when they entertain. The chipped, mismatched stuff that gets daily use pretty much lives in one dishwasher or the other, migrating back and forth at need, safely out of sight of guests.
I have a walnut dining room table with four chairs covered in needlepoint, and a beautiful tall carved Art Deco china cabinet, and a similar sideboard. We don’t use it for anything except I sometimes sit at the table when using my laptop. The china cabinet and sideboard are stuffed with supplies from long ago hobbies, knick-knacks, old camcorder tapes, and my favorite paperbacks from long ago. This furniture was left to me by my grandmother, who bought it in the 30’s or 40’s. I love it, but I don’t hold any dinner parties, in the dining room, anyway. I hope after I die, my daughter will take it and treasure it, but it doesn’t seem likely.
I like the 2 dishwasher idea, but then again I lived in a studio that had a Cook-n-Kleen [which I would dearly love to see back on the market] and sod all for cupboard space. I had a skillet/saucepan combo, a stock pot, 4 mugs, 4 bowls, 4 plates and flatware for 4, they all lived in the dishwasher and I normally handwashed dishes because I normally only cooked for 1 but when I had people over, pretty much everything got used so I would just run the dishwasher ][ cutting board and knives are always handwash]
I never thought of using mini fridges as end tables, though we did have one in the living room that served as the table we set a coffee maker/expresso machine on - we kept the dairy for the coffee, some cans of juice, mixers and beer, and cut up fruit and veggies as snacks. We kept the beer in the drawer and the goddaughters knew that if it was food and in there they could freely snack on it.
Is it dishwashers people are saying are useless, or are electric ones different? I guess I assume mine is electric. It’s just a cheap one, but it gets dishes totally clean and uses way less water than washing by hand.
I have a beautiful “Danish modern” teak dining room set (table, chairs and sideboard) that my parents bought in the late 50s. On the table is a gorgeous batik tablecloth that my mother made by hand. Nobody ever eats at the table, because I store piles of papers and stuff on it. The sideboard contains whatever my parents had in it when they died. I haven’t opened it in years.
I also have an antique sewing machine from the late 1800s. It operates by treadle, and is in working condition. It would look great by the window in the kitchen, but instead it sits in the basement.
