Yesterday, I examined the benefits of owning a washer and dryer when Lauren and I move into a house, whether that be later this year or in a couple years. Today, I’ll look at the next thing we have to look forward to—a better kitchen!

Lauren originally wanted me to write about dishes specifically, saying how we’ll be certain a future house has a dishwasher, and if it doesn’t, that will be one of the first new installments. But I have had dishwashers on and off over the years at various apartments, and we never had a dishwasher back on the farm, so we can’t say that dishwashers are exclusive to houses. Nevertheless, I will be ecstatic when we can have a machine wash and dry our dishes instead of doing it ourselves by hand.

Dishwashers are definitely not a solve-all kind of machine, though. I remember many times when Nick and I lived together in Eden Prairie how we’d never unload the dishwasher, so we’d just start throwing dirty dishes in with the clean ones and eventually couldn’t tell them apart and just washed everything over again, and the cycle repeated itself over and over. Dishwashers may take some of the pain out of doing dishes, but they don’t cure laziness.

We will also be able to look forward to having more counter space… or should I just say having counter space. At our current apartment, we have two very small 2-foot squares on each side of the sink, and a tiny little 8-inch wide slab between the fridge and stove. Especially for someone like Lauren who is constantly cooking and making meals to freeze and take to work for lunch, counter space is crucial. Sure, we’ve gotten by with what we have, but there’s so much clutter.

And storage space will be nice. With all the cabinets packed to the brim with the various freebies Lauren brings home from work, we have nowhere to put things like mixers and measuring cups except way on top of the cupboards which even I can barely reach. Our crappy shelf in the dining room is a conglomeration of liquor bottles, cook books, spices, jugs, and whatever else doesn’t fit elsewhere. So having space to put something will be very appreciated. But then again, the last house we lived in a 112 W 26th probably had even less storage space than our apartment, so you never know. I guess that’s something we’ll have to specifically look for when house hunting.