One of the things I have learned from renting apartments is that I don’t like crevices. Our last place had tile kitchen countertops, tile bathroom floor, and and all tile shower stall*. Cleaning it inspired some creative forms of procrastination. I even got so tired of scrubbing I used an old battery powered spinning toothbrush to get at the grout. Tile may be nice, but it is really a pain as your main kitchen work surface. Another apartment made me never want to get up on a ladder to dust picture rails again. (I know they make dust mops with extendable handles, we were too poor to buy one at the time, and the place was so tiny we couldn’t fit one more thing into it.)

In this temporary housing we have a coffee table with a decorative ridge running around the edge on the top. It’s pretty, but after previous occupants and our habit of eating dinner in front of the tv the ridge is filled with all sorts of mysterious dirt. Whoever designed this thing obviously lived a very proper life devoid of things like crumbs and dust.

Right now my dream house is filled with smooth, seamless plastic surfaces, which can be easily replaced, say snap in perhaps? You could change the colors every few years! Or maybe spray on, kind of the opposite of that rubber tool dip? Who do I talk to in order to make sure this is part of the house of the future? And ideally cleaning the house would only involve a garden hose.

* This is a reminder to myself to talk about how much I loved having a shower stall, and about the shower curtain set up in this place which works well.