Sometimes I look at a Sweethome pick and just think: Really? Almost twenty bucks for a can opener? I am both cheap and stubborn, and if I have it in my head that an item oughta cost a certain (usually unrealistically low) amount, this prejudice clouds my thinking about the entire purchase. I have made mistakes this way. I have cut corners. I’ve learned the hard way that a lot of these Sweethome picks truly are the best for most people, even the cheap and stubborn. Here are my sad examples.
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1. Can opener
Our pick
$17
from Amazon
£13
from Amazon
$23
from Amazon
¥2,435
from Amazon
Mighty fine can opener
OXO Good Grips Locking Can Opener with Lid Catch
The OXO Good Grips Locking Can Opener locks onto cans with a blade that cuts right through the lid. Its soft rubber coating makes it comfortable to use, and a magnet ensures that the lid doesn’t fall into your food.
When my wife and I first moved to Los Angeles, we lived for months in temporary housing with our belongings stuck in a storage facility somewhere between California and Chicago. We did a techung restocking of our basic supplies—techung being a Korean word that roughly translates to “good enough.” In fact, techung is a good word to know throughout this story, because all four of these things are techung buys and this first one is the tale of the techung can opener we got for a few bucks at a Japanese dollar store.
You really would not believe a can opener could be so bad unless you saw this garbage in action. To begin with, it could not even grip the can. I would think it had a grip, then I’d crank the wheel, and almost as soon as I transferred both hands to the tool it’d pop off. All of this slipping and slashing left the lid’s edge as ragged as if I’d chewed it open (which is a little like how using the tool felt). If I really wanted to get to my beans, I had to pry off the lid, now a mangled piece of shrapnel. Fortunately, we suffered no major lacerations before the movers arrived with our “real” can opener: the OXO Good Grips Soft Handled Can Opener.
You really would not believe a can opener could be so bad unless you saw this garbage in action.
This item is over a decade old now. It’s currently on Amazon at a few bucks less than the Sweethome pick, OXO’s Locking Can Opener with Lid Catch. Apparently the world of can openers has expanded a bit since I last shopped for one, but it’s still pretty clear that paying about $15 to $20 can get you a perfectly satisfying tool. If I had it to do over, I’d probably buy our pick. For that premium, you get a tool that, first of all, can open a can, and second, won’t send you to get stitches in the process. Totally worth it.
2. Ice cube trays
Our pick
$5
from Amazon
£10
from Amazon
$7
from Amazon
Buy
from Amazon
€10
from Amazon
A better ice cube tray
OXO Good Grips Trays
This tray’s slide-on plastic lid is helpful for blocking odors and easy stacking.The half moon shape allows cubes to be pushed out with a gentle nudge.
When we sold our ice cube trays at a sidewalk sale in Chicago, my wife said to me, “We shouldn’t get rid of these ice cube trays.” The exact ice cube trays we were unloading would go on, years later, to become a Sweethome pick for best ice cube tray: The OXO Good Grips Tray. I of course didn’t realize at the time what kind of ice tray treasure we were sitting on, and I’m pretty sure I said something like, “Y’know, those aren’t the only great ice cube trays in the world.” Well, it turns out, they pretty much are.
After dumping the trays, we had a few good fridge-years, with automatic ice aplenty, and never really thought of them again until we got to Los Angeles and began our months of rental kitchen purgatory. At the same Japanese dollar store where we got the techung can opener, we got three techung ice trays. But they were no OXOs. The trays themselves cracked after a hundred or so twists. Half the ice cubes came out cleft in twain. The lids warped in the cold and popped off, making stacking impossible. And one of the trays had an edge sharp enough to leave a purple indentation along your palm as you torqued its frozen bounty free.
One of the trays had an edge sharp enough to leave a purple indentation along your palm.
When we decided we had suffered long enough, we bought the OXO trays for the rental freezer. My wife reminded me we never should have sold them. She’s right! They’re still the best anywhere. Each half-moon pops out clean with very little effort. The plastic flexes nimbly enough for you to remove the ice all at once or in solo pieces. The lid slides off smoothly, as long as you didn’t get greedy with the refill pour. These trays are in our own freezer now, parked right next to the filtered, automatic ice maker and its bottomless icy cornucopia. I will never again part ways with these trays, and with any luck, I will never need to use them again either.
3. Trash can
Our pick
$100
from Amazon
€140
from Amazon
£85
from Amazon
$130
from Amazon
€140
from Amazon
€140
from Amazon
€140
from Amazon
$100
from Simplehuman
An awesome trash can
Simplehuman Rectangular Step Trash Can
This smart-looking can does the best job of fitting, hiding, and keeping trash bags in place. It is also easy to clean out, truly airtight, and has a five-year warranty.
The greatest trash can I ever used was at the trashiest house I ever lived in. It was the first (and worst) sublet we occupied on our sojourn to Los Angeles, and it was infested. In the middle of the kitchen, where enough roaches crawled around at night to make my cats hide by the porch door, sat the amazing Simplehuman Rectangular Step Trash Can, the Sweethome pick. Its steel skin was streaked with spilled milk and the removable liner’s bottom was crusted with congealed seepage, but its step action was silky smooth, and the lid lifted so elegantly as I dropped off an endless supply of dead bugs and blackened Swiffer pads. The can’s mouth opened wide enough to gobble down full dustpans of dog hair. The removable inner bin lifted free with a smooth whoosh. Most of the time, I hauled the bags to the dumpster in this light plastic sleeve. It was a critical feature, as my bags were always full to bursting, because—and this may help explain the apartment’s general state—the Simplehuman was the only trash can in the whole place. It does currently cost a hundred bucks. Maybe the tenants blew their whole garbage can budget in one shot. But now that I’ve seen what a hundred bucks worth of trash can looks like, I gotta say, it’s something special.
Its step action was silky smooth, and the lid lifted so elegantly as I dropped off an endless supply of dead bugs and blackened Swiffer pads.
Now we’re ruined. We bought a Sunbeam TrashRac, a budget pick in the Sweethome guide to small trash cans, for our place in Los Angeles, but we haven’t installed it. After the Simplehuman, there’s just no going back. I tell myself the TrashRac doesn’t fit in this kitchen, but the truth is, it doesn’t fit in my heart. My current can is a nondescript open bin in the bottom of a cabinet that I have to lean into, low, like I’m bowling my garbage down the lane. It serves the purpose, but it’s sad, and it makes me regret the first time I ever walked up to the Simplehuman, pressed its shiny pedal, watched the lid slowly rise up, and fed it a dustpan of dead roaches.
4. Lawnmower
Our pick
$600
from Home Depot
$600
from Mowers Direct
Lawnmower of dreams
Honda HRX217K5VKA
The Honda is in a class of its own. Reliability and performance are unmatched, and a unique system dials in what you’re bagging and mulching, making yard work easier.
As a kid I dreamed of the day I would get to mow my family’s lawn all by myself. In the itemized list of chores at my house, mowing the lawn, at $20, was by far the most lucrative job available. One day my dream finally came true. Then I realized why my dad set the price so high.
Even for a grownup, even in the 1980s, his Craftsman mower would be considered a primitive mechanized farming implement and a miserable thing to use. For a kid it was even worse. It didn’t have self-propulsion and it weighed a ton, made entirely of chunky, rusty metal, with a mower bag that itself weighed a good 10 pounds empty. Put in a 3-inch pile of damp Georgia fescue and the weight quadrupled. It lacked a mulching feature, so it was all bagging, and I was constantly emptying the bag, lifting it up and over a Roughneck trash can rim that hit me at about armpit height. It was horribly difficult to start, and at my height, the fully extended starter cord came up past my head, so I basically had to grab it and take a flying leap sideways. Eventually, a black plume of smoke rose as the engine roared to life, and I was in business again.
Even for a grownup, even in the 1980s, his Craftsman mower would be considered a primitive mechanized farming implement and a miserable thing to use.
Not content to settle for such an inferior machine, I scoured the Sears ads on Sundays and ripped out pages of riding mowers, and calculated how many dozens of mowings I’d have to put in before being able to buy one with my own cash. I watched neighbors in envy as they strolled behind their self-propelled machines. Once, the neighbor across the street, who had a supersweet riding mower, asked me to mow his grass while he was away. I thought I’d experience that machine and get a taste of the glory, but it was not to be—he instructed me to push my own heap over to do the job, “so I’d feel more comfortable.” I grew up with that mower, and as I got bigger it got easier. I hauled it off to more and more neighbors’ lawns, bagged more grass, and made more money. But I never reached my goal of the dream mower I ripped out of the Sears ads.
Well, that’s not entirely true. One summer home from college I got a job as a pro mower in metro Atlanta and I got to take a spin on some of the finest pieces of mowing machinery money could buy. We mowed the manicured grounds of McMansions, the holy grasses of megachurches, and everything from the lushest lawns to the lowliest medians. My meth-addict parolee colleagues and I raced $2,700 Toro TimeCutter riding mowers across mall parking lots. I strolled behind a predecessor of the Sweethome mower pick, the smell of two-stroke exhaust and cut grass in my nose like a redneck twist on Proust’s madeleine. I learned a lot that summer—in particular, that mowing the grass in summer in Georgia always sucks. But also that a brilliant lawnmower can make a mighty big difference.
(Photo by Michael Hession.)