You know when you finally resolve a small but lingering irritation in your home and it feels disproportionately thrilling? Like when organizing the utensil drawer or getting that rug to stop slipping feels almost as good as, say, painting a room or something that just seems like a much bigger deal? I love that. Sometimes it’s the smallest of tweaks that go the furthest toward making our homes the havens they should be. So I say the minor revolutions in our homes are to be celebrated! For example…
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Hubby is a very committed recycler. We met and first lived together in Oregon where recycling is kind of a big deal. I’m not anti; I am totally on board with recycling. It’s just that I’m also (1) lazy and (2) not a fan of having piles of garbage in our living space. This combination has caused me frustration for years, but let’s just cover the period since we moved into 110.
When we bought the house, we inherited a city-issued yellow recycling bin that sat next to our front porch. It wasn’t working wonders for our curb appeal, but then neither was the view of our actual house from the curb, so I could get past the bin’s ugliness. It was also too small for a week’s worth of recycling, which made for some even less attractive overflow. But the real issue was that it was out front, while our kitchen–where 90% of our recycling is generated–is at the back of the house. We would invariably pile up recyclables on the kitchen counter until the teetering mess drove us (usually me) nuts and was moved.
On a good day it was moved directly to the recycling bin, which involved walking across the front porch and dropping stuff down into the bin (decent aim and bounce management required). I know, it sounds onerous. Which is why the pile was typically just moved from the kitchen to the front entry way, sometimes in a bag hanging on the front door knob. Classy touch, no? “Welcome to our home. Please ignore the refuse.”
The situation improved when {my dream came true and} recycling pick up switched to the alley behind our house. No more ugly bin out front, and we upgraded to a larger bin so overflow wouldn’t be an issue. But you know what was still an issue? My laziness. Check this out: The new bin is like forty feet from the back door. Forty feet, people! I think you can guess that I’m not running out there every time I empty a box or bottle or something, which seems to happen every fifteen minutes (unless I’m cooking, in which case it’s more like every fifteen seconds). So we had the same old piles-on-the-counter issue. Have I mentioned how little counter space we have? Picture half of that overrun with barely rinsed yogurt tubs and such. (For added realism, also picture a bunch of dishes, junk mail, crayons, miscellaneous project supplies, etc.) But I have done it; I have slain the recycling beast. Behold:
This decent enough looking seat has a secret.
Yes, joy of joys, we now have a place to stash recyclables immediately outside the kitchen. This is a distance I can handle. When the bench fills up, we just carry the liner (all forty feet) to the blue bin and dump. And that’s it, folks. That’s all it took to rid me of this years-long frustration of trying to be a good person while actually being a lazy person.
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