We went bin shopping today after our trusty Brabantia bin broke last week from severe old age. After checking how much a direct replacement was and going “How did we ever spend that much money on a bin?”, it was decided we needed to buy something else. In fairness to Brabantia, the bin did, like I say last a very long time, it was our second Brabantia bin, our first, which was even larger, was given to me by my dad, years ago, as a birthday present, don’t laugh, I actually asked for it, I had gone to visit my dad and he goes “Look at my shiny new bin” and ooh it was love at first sight, so he ended up buying me one to. Ironically that first bin is still going strong at the mother-in-law’s, we donated it when we moved into our current place and had no room for it and ended up buying a new smaller bin for us. Having said that, that first bin hasn’t had years of little people opening and closing it with great vigour!
So, even though, when we moved into our current place, we brought ourselves a new smaller bin, it was still too big to actually fit in our extremely small kitchen, which basically has no floor space other than the narrow galley walkway between the two rows of units. So we kept our new smaller bin in our small central hallway (imagine a large cupboard – about that size) that links the kitchen, living room, bathroom and two bedrooms. It worked, even if it was slightly odd, put it this way, we never had to go very far in any of the rooms in the flat to throw away rubbish (consequently it was the only rubbish bin in the flat), it was a bit of a pain in the neck though when working in the kitchen, to have to leave the kitchen if you want to throw anything away. It was also a worry for when we come to eventually put this place on the market “Come buy this flat, where the kitchen is so small you can’t even put a bin in it!”. So sorting out the bin issue was on the ‘great list of things to do if we ever want to stand a chance of selling this place’. There are a lot of things on that list, big, expensive things unfortunately. We’ve done the small things, like re-tile the bathroom and some unintentionally big things that were extremely necessary at the time, namely sound proofing our ceilings (that wiped our savings out, thank you neighbours) but we have yet to rip out and replace our crumbling montrosity of a patio and replace the electrics, kitchen, back door and back windows but today . . . we have at least solved the bin in the hallway problem. When we originally moved in we did look at under the counter bin solutions but couldn’t find anything remotely big enough that wouldn’t require emptying about five times a day. But thankfully there now is, a reasonable sized bin from Simple Human.
Yesterday was Mr. Lacer doing a spot of plumbing (very handy, my husband) to shorten some of the pipes under the sink and today was getting and installing the bin and trying to figure what on earth to do with the array of cleaning chemicals that was under the sink. The bin only takes up half the under sink cupboard but so as not to give the kids an excuse never to throw away anything again, we’ve had to take the child latches off that cupboard. So the under sink chemicals have had to be divided in half, both lots going in cupboards on the wall, probably a good thing, it’d have only been a matter of time before they figured out the child latches, although a bad thing in that one of those cupboards was our drinks cupboard, not that we drink much!
