The Kitchen Sink

I thought today I'd bring you along as we process ideas for utilizing our new house. We've been thinking through each room, talking about storage solutions (only one bedroom has a closet), lighting issues (half the rooms have no exterior light), traffic flow (with such loooooong narrow rooms, this is complicated), etc.

One interesting dilemma involves our future kitchen sink. As you can see in the picture below, it is a single bowl sink, with two draining boards. We actually have a sink just like this in our current house. We don't have an automatic dishwasher, of course, so we place a dish drying rack on one side of the sink. On the other side we sit a large dishpan full of clean rinse water. Then, we can fill the actual sink with warm, soapy water, and spend an hour or so washing dishes.



Now, the one thing this sink does not have, which our current sink does have, is counter space anywhere near it. That empty space next to the sink counter is where either the refrigerator or the stove is meant to go. So, the question is: "Where do we put the dirty dishes, as we are working our way through washing them?" With eight family members, and frequent guests, we create a lot of dirty dishes. They have to go somewhere.

I must admit, though, that we aren't overly distressed about this dilemma. The sink in our current kitchen has such a bad plumbing problem (the repair of which would involve tearing into the concrete wall behind the sink) that we are actually putting a dishpan into the sink, rather than putting water directly into the sink, and then carrying the dishpan outside to dump dirty water out in the yard. If we allow water to go down the drain in our current sink, it just flows out onto the kitchen floor, creating a big mess! Surely whatever we resolve to do about the pile-up of dirty dishes in the new house will be an easier solution than what we are having to do now - right?