Tired of Tile?

This pile is an accumulation of cleaned cooking stuff from making one dinner this past week.  When you make meals from scratch, there's a lot to clean up.  I'm showing this picture to demonstrate the kinds of wet stuff that ends up on our countertop in the course of a day.  This is just one load of hand washed items that had to be dealt with.  For most days, this will repeat two or three times.  Before I retired, this pile would grow and grow, sitting out for hours on end.

Here's an example of what that porcelain fix super glue product looked like once it was applied to a damaged tile.  The white sticks out quite a bit.  If there is one lesson I hope others retain from reading the never-ending series of posts about my white tile kitchen, it's a "DON'T DO THIS!"  White is hard to keep clean, as it ages, it loses the original brightness, and it looks dingy no matter how hard you try to keep it fresh.

The last step in my tile revival, was caulk.  We went out and bought a new tube and TBG got a gun from work.  Turns out, I had an open squeeze tube from sealing the ugly white grout and tile in our bathroom before we renovated.  Yes, someone not only tiled the kitchen in white tile and grout, they used it in the bathroom.  I still need to scrub and buff the stainless steel around the sink.  I did some caulking around that but it was a messy, tedious, and largely ineffective use of time.

One reason the grout got so cruddy, was that wet dishes on soggy drying mats, sat for hours.  Now that I'm home and able to keep up the house, and also since I spent so much time repairing the grout, the new routine is to put everything away! Sounds simple, but not so easy when there is no time.  Dishes can air dry for an hour or so, but after that, they get put away.  The drying mats are going to hang dry.  Previously, I propped them in back of the toaster, and one got slightly burnt!  They looked sloppy too.

While this isn't a perfect solution, it does work better. I unscrewed the handles, slipped on the ring, and now the damp mats can be clipped in place.

Over the next month or so, I plan to sand and paint the cabinet -- and replace the horrible drawer handles!  I'm asking all to ignore how dingy this surface looks and to give me a pass on this unstylish, but convenient solution.  When you lack storage space in your kitchen, life is one big hack!