The one plate plan

Yesterday, B. and I signed the lease on a charming, spacious, and affordable apartment in a neighborhood we like. It is perfect in every way but one: the lack of a dishwasher. To prevent us from allowing our kitchen to fill up with dirty dishes, we have come up with a plan: we are going to place all of our normal dishes in a difficult-to-reach cabinet and reserve them for entertaining. For everyday use, we are each going to select and purchase one each of the following: plate, bowl, glass, mug, knife, fork, and spoon. We're going to choose weird, interesting, mismatched stuff based solely on how cool we think it looks. Then we are each going to use those dishes to eat on.

This means (1) there will be no opportunity for a building-up of dishes that would necessitate a lengthy dishwashing session, because we will be forced to wash dishes at every meal (or we won't have anything to eat on), and (2) if one of us leaves our dishes lying around, there will be no question about whose it was, because we each have our own (I don't really anticipate the two of us fighting over who leaves dishes out, but accountability of this sort would have been very helpful when warmfuzzy and I were growing up).

I'm actually kind of excited about going to thrift stores and looking for interesting dishes that I think are awesome but which I wouldn't want to (or be able to) buy a whole set of.