Dishwashing Gloves

Hello everyone!

I just did something amazing, and I want to share it because it could probably help some others, too.

Whenever I wash dishes, I need to use dishwashing gloves. A lot of hot water and soap can be tough on anyone’s skin, but since I have eczema and highly sensitive skin, gloves are even more important for me.

With that said, dishwashing gloves can get expensive, so I try to use them for as long as I can. That means to carefully keep them out of the water since it can be difficult to dry out the insides. Unfortunately, keeping my gloves out of the water can be a real task. I like to drape them over the edge of the sink so that the wet ends can dry, and the gloves like to slip into the sink which tends to be filled with dirty dishes and water. This is especially a problem whenever someone else washes dishes, because others are not as careful as I am to keep my gloves clean and dry.

But today, I finally cracked it! There’s a wall overhanging my sink, so I stuck a command hook on there and hung a binder clip on that. Now, I can clip up my gloves so they will still dry over the sink, but they won’t keep slipping into the sink water.

I feel like the binder clip clamps down pretty hard on the gloves, so I would like to find a way to refine this concept in the future, but it definitely works!

I am a bit sad that I figured this out now, as my husband and I are moving in a week (fingers crossed – we planned to move a month ago). Even so, I can still use this idea after we move.

Also, let me take a moment to brag on my husband. So, I cook a lot – like, all of our meals plus snacks plus our dog’s food. Our current kitchen is galley-style with about 4 feet of counter space. Basically, it’s a small hallway with a stove. We can’t even open our fridge enough to use both the vegetable drawers. In the house were planning to move into, everything that’s in our “hallway” has been turned into an L-shape with an extra foot or so of counter space thrown in. It’s way better since we’ll be able to have multiple people in the kitchen, but it’s still going to be small for all my cooking. The floor area of the new kitchen is about 10’x10′. That’s plenty of room for some extra counter space to be added (which would make the space near perfect), but much of that space is intended to serve as a dining area. Until today, I was assuming that I wasn’t going to get much more cooking space out of this move, but I like the rest of the house and the location, so I kept my mouth shut. Then, out of the blue, today my husband mentions that he wants to have a collapsible table and have our dining area in the living room! Apparently he was wanting a bigger kitchen, too! He doesn’t get the full impact of this, but my husband just gave me my dream kitchen today!

Back to the glove solution. This should be a game changer for me, and I’m betting it will help others out as well. Also, this was free for me to do. I had the command hook and the clip laying around the house. You can accomplish the same thing with a pushpin or a short nail and a laundry pin (which will probably be something I do in the future). Once we move into the new house, I’m sure I’ll be coming up with and/or utilizing others’ ideas to increase space. This new place is only 850 sq ft. For some people, that’s a lot. However, our household consists of 2 adults, a child on the way, and 2 large dogs. We also live in the Deep South, so it’s not like we can spend most of our time outside for 9 months of the year. Even so, I know that I only think it’s small because of my privileges, and I know for a fact that this is very doable. I’ll be implementing a lot of space-saving techniques though. Something that I plan to do, and have been wanting for a while now, is to have a dish drying rack over the back of the sink so that the dishes can just live there after we wash them. I’ll be showing that off when we do it.

So, stay tuned to see the cheap, space-saving ideas I’ll be using. They’ll likely be much like this glove idea. If you can’t go out, go up! Vertical space usage seems to be the way to go.

Metta my friends!