Saturday 31 January 2015

No one needs 25 plates

Hello!

Guess what? I finally was able to leave the house that was my home! I tried moving out earlier but then just couldn't do it. But now I've moved to a lovely flat in the city centre and I feel at home here. I can give you a house tour once I've finally organised this place. So maybe in June?

Nostalgic candlelit shower time at the old place.

Here most rented flats come fully furnished and equipped with crockery, cleaning tools and lots of random things ― some useful, some really not. I've lived in an unfurnished flat before and therefore already have quite a lot of useful things such as kitchenware. Which means that I tend to just move all the pots, pans, plates, bowls, mugs and blenders into the storage cupboard so that they are not in my way. Most of them look like they are the landlord's old things that they just don't like to use at home. They remind me of kitchenware that you would normally find at a Finnish summer cottage. But as nice as it would be for someone who doesn't own those things themselves, I prefer to eat out of my rainbow bowl. I also own too many mugs already and I really don't need any more kitchen stuff in the cupboard. Otherwise I probably would never do the washing up.

I do respect the size of those wine glasses we were supplied though!

But of course when I moved out I had to put the plates and bowls back into the kitchen cupboard, and because I'm nice and well-behaved citizen I also washed them before I did so. I felt that the washing up would never end ― there were always more plates. Twenty-five in total. Who need that many plates at their home? I mean, it's great to have that many if you want to host a wedding or feed a whole army or something, but I didn't even have large enough cooking facilities for such gatherings.

Approximately half of those plates.

This move really helped me to down-size a little bit. I would still like to have less stuff though, but I managed to throw a lot of things out and to take a couple of bags of clothes to a charity shop. I also think that maybe I should take some of my books somewhere as well. For instance, I probably don't need to hold onto a French grammar book that I own. I never read it.

But washing all of those plates made me really grateful that I don't own that many. Although I was a bit shocked when I realised that I still do own 8 plates and 8 bowls. That's more than I thought! But it's a good amount, there's never too much washing up to do. There's 4 big plates and 4 small plates, 4 matching bowls, 2 mismatching bowls and 2 fancy Finnish Iittala Teema "designer" bowls that I took with me when I first moved to Scotland. Bowls are good for serving things in, and it's normal to have 4 people eating if you have a small dinner party.


What's your idea of a good number of plates and bowls? Do you have many fancy sets to suit every occasion? Or just enough for yourself and prefer to ask your guests to bring their own bowls if they come over for food?