Do you have one of these in your medicine cabinet? It's a small slit in the back wall of the cabinet that is just big enough for an old razor blade to slip through.
A helpful designer at one point decided that allowing residents to slip razor blades into the space between the walls was better than having them placed in the garbage.
Slits like this have disappeared. I haven't seen any holes at the Bathroom trade shows for my Mach III blades and the thought of pushing a disposable razor blade through a hole in the wall would seem really odd at this point.
But something else is funny about this old fashioned design in the back of my cabinet. Bill McDonough tipped me off to it a few years ago:
We used to be able to throw things away. Remember that? Things went "away." Where is "away" now? "Away" is here. "Away" is someone's back yard. There is no place to go from here. We now see that we inhabit a smaller and smaller planet. "Away" has become very close indeed.
It's all true. When I was a kid, I put my father's razor blades through the slit in our home bathroom and loved it. I used to put as many as I could and probably put a few other things through there as well.
Things have changed since then. Now I separate my garbage before putting it out. Now I know how hard it is to get rid of an old fridge. Now I expect people to pick up after their dogs. Now I filter my tap water.
Why? Because just like the vanishing slit in my medicine cabinet, there is no such thing as "away" any more.
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Comments (26)
i have one in a house i own upstate. and there's also a chute in the bathroom that you can use to send your laundry down to the basement!
I have been using a safty razor for the past year, partially because it is retro, partially because I like the heavy feel of the metal holder, and partially to reduce my trash. each replacement refill container has a dispenser on one side and a slot to place used blades on the oppposite side... I dont use the slot in the back of my medicine cabinet.
This is seriously blowing my mind people. I don't have one of these in my medicine cabinet, but I have seen them in others and it never really clicked with me that there might be a reason for it if I'd seen it in more than one place. So interesting.
I always thought that slot was for ventilation (for what, I am not sure, its just what I thought). I have one in my medicine cabinet and (although I am willing to bet I am one of the most bug-phobic people on this site) am not worried about bugs coming out of it. The whole medicine cabinet screws in with 4 screws, so if bugs can come thru the slot, they can come out between the spaces between the cabinet and the wall.
I'm currently saving for a bathroom reno, so if (when) we open the wall and there are rusty razor blades in there, I promise to photograph them!
that orb did look like a fake boob.
in the apartment i grew up in we had a pie box underneath the ktichen window. for years my mom used it as a mini tool shed until one day i asked the buildings owner what it was , and he said when the building was built , it was the "in, modern " thing to do to have a built in pie cupboard. it was really cool except in the winter..and the time that waterbug climbed in. yeah it lost its charm after that.
Think a stack of rusty razor blades is freaky? Imagine what is in your vents and below your floor boards! Tons of space for buttons, bobby pins, pennies, dirt and yes creepy crawlies as well as waterbugs. Do Yankees even know what a waterbug is?
two years ago i helped a friend tear out his old bathroom. behind the medicine cabinet was a wall FULL of razor blades. so to answer the question: who cleans it out? WE DID. it was disgusting to clean out someone's old razor blades so i'm glad that the slot is now a thing of the past.
Yes, we do have waterbugs in NY. I used to live an apartment that was crawling with them. God, they were awful!
The idea is neat, until you want to renovate one of those old houses...
http://www.komejo.com/house/010303.php?page_title=01/03/03%20-%20Bathroom
I grew up with one of those in the house and my dad used it. At the time, I wondered if it would ever fill up! I just bought a house and there is one in the medicine cabinet. As the bathroom will be the first big renovation (some day...) I'm intrigued by what I might find.
And...opoponax: From the Mixed Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler was my fave book as a kid. I recently re-read it for kicks. I love the idea of hiding out in a museum!
Just a comment about the Razor Saver ... I have one and it does not work with any of the new-fangled razors (at least the womens ones ... not sure about the mens). The razor heads are too big to fit in the slot. It does work with disposables though ...
Amazing...crazy but amazing.
AL
Kurt -- my natural pest exterminator said that 'waterbug' are cockroaches. He did specify the breed, but I forget what he said. Nevertheless, a type of roach. I do remember that!
oh my goodness, I never even noticed there was a slot there until I just went and checked my medicine cabinet! and since the cabinet in this apartment is exactly the same as the one in my last apartment and the one in my house growing up... I must have missed that slot for 22.5 years! though the slot in mine is larger than in this picture.
and analog, growing up my house had the laundry chute, too.
We pulled out an old medicine cabinet last year and were baffled by the razors we found in the cavity behind it. It never occurred to us that someone put them back there on purpose.
ironically, i just moved into a new place and saw one of these for the first time when i was re-finishing the medicine cabinet (i live in texas, and believe it or not, a lot of our older architecture has fallen victim to unplanned development and hyper-urbanization). being an avid recycler, the idea that people disposed on things in their wall was absolutely mystifying. so much so, i actually removed the cabinet (i had to repaint it anyway) and checked with a flashlight in the crawl space. it was too deep so see anything, but i wonder if the principle of "in-house" disposal had anything to do with ideas of public health at the time (?). that is to say, much in the same way it was illegal to spit on the side walks (god, i wish it still was), maybe it was considered to "unhygienic" to have people's personal hygiene products mingling in an open dump. or maybe, as mentioned, people were simply more wasteful and individualistic back then :) it's fun to think about though. then again, we still have stinky garbage disposals in our sinks... maybe its not all that strange after all...
We once lived in an old rowhouse with a medicine cabinet slot that out to be waterbug hideout, too. When my husband removed the cabinet, I saw what I think was a cluster of waterbug egg sacks glued just underneath the slot. Naturally, we taped over ours, too. Eww.
Sorry to always join the conversation particularly enthusiastically when there's an insect issue at hand. I probably need therapy because of some of the apartments I've lived in!
This is surreal!
OK, So they have a deodorant rock plus a Dove deodorant stick? That doesn't make too much sense. It looks like a plastic baggie with lotion in it.
There are any number of reasons why they would have both the stick and rock for deodorant, for instance maybe they tried the stick and then got the rock and kept the stick for backup, or not everyone in the house likes the same kind. Or they got the rock as a present. If they don't use it, maybe it keeps the cabinet smelling good (or not smelling at all).
We recently renovated our bathroom and found at least fifty blades:
http://farm2.static.flickr.com/1200/829185514_8083ca3b7d.jpg
we have one of those slots in our medicine cabinet, which looks like it's from the 60s or 70s. we also have an ironing board built into the wall, which is pretty nifty. my brooklyn apartment was built in 1901, so i imagine the ironing board might be from back then, too.
okay, maybe I'm a little too squeamish here, but THAT IS DISGUSTING!
What happens when it fills up??
very interesting, but i thought i read this last year.
I just posted a blog article about my family's funny experience with a razor blade slit, when I was a child in Ketchikan, Alaska. You can read about it here: http://lindaswindow.blogspot.com/2007/08/rain-and-razor-blades.html
As I was writing it, I thought I'd look out on the internet to see if anyone else remembered these funny little slots, and that's how I found this site. I enjoyed the article.
My dad says that when he was growing up, there was a hole in the wall next to the stove for disposal of matches.