Garbage Doesn’t Get Better With Time

I keep doing things to improve the house.

Today, I’m looking for ways to get rid of the trash compactor.

I’ll tell you right off; if you use a trash compactor, I have no respect for your trash standards. There are lots of reasons to avoid them, and there is only one reason for having one: laziness.

Garbage compactors attract and feed roaches, ants, mice, and rats. Anything that can squeeze in there will stuff itself on your garbage and then pee and poop all over your kitchen.

Garbage compactors stink. You can’t keep unrefrigerated garbage in your kitchen for days without growing bacteria and fungus.

Garbage compactors turn what should be light, fresh, manageable bags of garbage into heavy bags of rotten garbage.

Garbage compactors encourage dirty, low-class habits.

I used the compactor in this house for a while because the people who built it seemed to know what they were doing. There is no garbage collection, so I drive my garbage to the dump. I thought the previous owners, as longtime farm residents, knew something I did not, so for a time, I tried to do whatever they did.

Eventually, I quit. I could not see any virtues in the compactor. It smelled, the bugs loved it, the bags were heavy, and it didn’t actually save me much work.

At some point, I decided I would no longer tolerate having edible garbage in the house overnight. I started putting all trash that had food in it in the garage in a sealed can before bedtime. I abandoned the garbage compactor, cleaned it as well as I could, and hosed it with pesticide.

Now the kitchen never smells like rotten food, and the bugs and mice are out of luck.

I go to the dump three times a week. Twice if I forget. I buy cheap 30-gallon plastic bags for 10 cents each online, I use them for garbage and lining Marvin’s cage, and I end up spending something like $120 per year. If that sounds like a lot, find out what you spend on expensive bags from the store. A cheap store bag runs 25 cents. Big-name brands cost a lot more. If you’re buying store bags, you’re probably paying more than 2.5 times what I pay.

Last time I bought cheap bags online, I bought a box of 1500. I don’t play. Next time, I’ll try Ebay and see if China has anything cheaper.

Bag makers like Hefty love to talk about how tough their bags are. Know why? They’re trying to appeal to dirty, lazy people. “We know you only take the trash out once a month, so here’s a bag you can jam 50 pounds into. Go ahead and jam your foot in there. Pack it down good. Our bag won’t split. Comes with free cotton to shove up your nose.”

You don’t need tough bags. You need to get your butt to the curb or the dump more often.

What do professionals use, in places where letting trash sit can lead to big fines? They use exactly what I use. You’ve seen them beside highways, waiting to be picked up. You’ve seen them on the backs of utility carts at stadiums and malls. Hefty bags are for people who let garbage rot in their houses.

If your trash is moving out of your house in a timely way, you don’t need a bag that can contain a rabid wolverine. It just has to survive long enough to make it to the can or the dumpster.

I’m naturally lazy myself, so anything that helps me improve is welcome.

When I was looking after my dad, I was lazy with the garbage. Usually, I didn’t do all that bad, but often I made dump visits a week apart, which was disgraceful. There were times when the bed of the pickup was pretty full.

When you have a dementia patient in your house, garbage piles up fast. You need to stay on top of it. I did a poor job. Since then, by God’s grace, I have repented. In the time since I turned over a new leaf, there have been days when I simply forgot to go, and I ended up with little ecosystems developing in the bags, but overall, I love going to the dump, and it’s unusual for me to miss visits.

When I go, I see horrendous scenes that take me back, except many are a lot worse than the scenes I caused. Many people show up with pickups entirely full of bags. I see people walking quickly to the dumpsters, holding dripping bags as far from themselves as they can. I’ve seen utility trailers covered with bags.

When I go to the dump, I look carefully at the people in front of me. Here’s a tip for dump users: never get behind a trailer, a pickup, or a van if you can help it. There is a reason people bring vehicles like that. Clean people generally drive passenger cars and only have a few bags.

Now that I have better habits, I am disturbed by other people’s practices. I pray for them. I look at their beat-up cars, their mountains of maggot-ridden trash, their tasteless, ill-fitting, stained, worn-out clothes, their tattoos, their obesity, and even their bad posture, and I realize they have problems going far beyond poor trash standards. I know demons are involved. They need to know God. I am being improved, and they need the same help I’m getting.

I want to get rid of the trash compactor and fill the space with some kind of storage, but I don’t know if there is any way to do it without ruining the way the kitchen looks. Maybe a handyman could find a matching set of drawers.

I also want to get rid of my terrible sink.

The lady who designed the kitchen was no cook. I can tell, because she did things a good cook would not do. First, the compactor. Second, she bought a 4-burner electric stove with a useless electric grill taking up space in the middle. Third, she put her wall oven at knee height. Fourth, she gave a microwave priority, installing it above the oven. And the oven the house came with had no warming drawer.

The worst thing she did was to install a two-basin sink.

My sink has a gigantic basin on the left, and it has a small basin on the right with a garbage disposal. The big basin is too small to wash cookie sheets. Unforgivable. The small basin is not much good for anything.

I tried to find out why people get two-basin sinks, since it’s clearly a stupid design. It turns out one answer is laziness. People want to be able to hide dirty dishes in one basin.

Okay, so your dishwasher is a foot from the sink, and you want a place to hide dirty dishes instead of, at the very least, putting them in the dishwasher to wait.

You already have a roach feeder full of old garbage, and you want to add a roach buffet to the sink area.

What?

I remember a time when I was too lazy to put dishes in the machine. I would say it ended about 25 years ago. If you can’t find it in yourself to put a dish on a dishwasher rack and push a button, you have a very serious problem. As I did, for half of my life.

I want to put a new sink in, but the old one is in a stone counter, and they cut the stone so you can’t put a rectangular sink in it. You have to find a sink that’s bigger on the left side. Turns out they exist. I guess a lot of people got tired of their ill-conceived two-basin sinks and had them replaced. If you’re in my shoes, you may be able to buy a one-basin offset sink that will fit your hole. “Offset” is the Google term you need.

You may also be able to use an apron sink. These things rest on top of counters, covering up a lot of the stone. If your counter has weird cuts in it, you may be able to put an apron sink on it.

I think I am headed for an apron sink. The likelihood that a one-basin offset sink will fit the cutout I have now is not high, and I don’t believe I can make my cutout fit a new sink without ruining the cutout’s appearance. An apron sink doesn’t need a perfect cutout because the edges of the cutout would be covered. I should be able to open my cutout up with an angle grinder and make an apron sink fit.

My advice is to avoid garbage compactors and two-basin sinks. Sooner or later, you will know you made big mistakes.

I want a new faucet to go with the sink. The existing faucet is very low, which is extremely bad design. You want to be able to get things between the faucet and the sink. Big things, like 3-gallon pots. The faucet I have is in the way all the time, and it dribbles water back onto the stone, where a calcium crust forms.

I plan to get what is known as a pot-filler faucet. It will arch up over the sink, and it will have a built-in sprayer on a hose.

I don’t know how the original owner’s wife managed to do anything in the kitchen. Maybe she didn’t.

I’ve talked to Rhodah about these things, and she says I should wait until she moves here. That never occurred to me. I’m so used to the single mindset. Having someone to help me is a new experience.