Simplify Doing the Dishes

Step 2 Ration Your Dishes

We decided that there were too many times when we and the kids would grab a bowl or plate or cup, use it for ten minutes and then toss it in the sink. They would build up over the day. We would try to use a cup for water or juice throughout the day but we would forget or two of us would have similar cups and we'd loose track of which one was which. We even tried each of us having a place where we kept a cup. That didn't work at all.

Realizing we would have to eat and drink far less or actually keep up with the dishes we set out to find a way to enforce doing the dishes.

We decided that everyone would have their own bowl and plate (we recently added our own cups). Unless company was over and we were eating with the fancy dishes, no one is allowed to use anything other than their assigned dishes.

We got unbreakable plastic dishes from a local grocery store because we have young children. Using a Sharpie marker we write the first initial of each of us on the bottom of the dish.

Comments

[MTJimL]

Two thoughts: Unbreakable is good; plastic is bad. Unless you have access to something better than melamine, you'll discover it's not dishwasher safe. Second, rather than marking the plates with "permanent" Magic Marker, try buying from open stock. Give each person a choice(kids love to choose); that way they will bond with their personal plate because it's different from the rest, as are they.

And regarding the comment by "jodiwer" on the previous step: Envy is an ugly word, and to imply snidely that someone doesn't live in the real world because of a possibly higher income smacks of that unbecoming characteristic. But I'm sure "jodiwer" is a wonderful person and I misread the comment completely.

[rhaubejoi]

well said MTJiml. My former in-laws (whom I still dearly love) had 6 kids and their solution was everyone had a specific color for their dishes. red, yellow, green, blue, pink, purple. It seems the colors would be easier to tell at a glance instead of having to look at the bottom of a dish. Especially a filled glass of tea. I have a small family but it seems the dishes still pile up too quick since we don't have a dishwasher. Oh well, grandma did fine without one for all those years, so I suppose I'll live..lol

[bigjeff5]

When I was growing up my parents had two dishwashers:

Me and my older brother.

[EmmettO]

Different color dishes is also a perfectly acceptable methiod of acomplishing this.

[mtk99]

This is interesting but the fact that you have a little amount of dishes that i can see I have a sink in my home that's most likely about 4x larger and we do dishes about twice a day I hate it but it still needs to be done taking about 4minutes plus sometimes to get it done.

[EmmettO]

Heh heh, yeah I took this picture on a good day.

[endolith]

I tried to do this in college, putting lots of extra dishes in a cardboard box under the sink and taping it up real nice so it would be more work to open the box than to wash some dishes. :D My roommates were so pissed. But god, they would pile up dishes so high in the sink that the ones at the bottom would break.

Now I live alone and I only have 1 set of dishes. The rest are in a cabinet with crumbs and stuff, so I consider them "dirty". Since they would need washing anyway, it's easier to wash the ones that are already out.

[dreadengineer]

Rationing dishes also works with less-responsible college roommates. In my apartment, after constant problems with dirty dishes, we ended up emptying the cupboards of all dishes and silverware and each person had to keep their own. (I think living with 7 other guys is the quickest possible way to realize the flaws of communal property ownership.)