apartment therapy changing the world, one room at a time

WHAT is that blobby thing underneath the slit?

Oh! Don't get me started... As we speak my husband is at the store trying to get razor refills for our razor. But they keep changing the blades and the handle. We have trays of blades that don't fit into any of our handles. Sensor I, II, III? Sensor Plus? Mach, Mach Excell? And now, instead of throwing away a single blade, which would probably rust away in the wall, we dispose of a 2, 3, how many more bladed thing with plastic? What's the progress in this? Where are the long lasting Wilkinson Sword double-edged blades of my hippy days when shaving was, in fact, optional?

Wow, I do have one of those in my medicine cabinet! I suppose I’ve noticed it before, but I never gave it much thought. It makes me want to void my lease by ripping the thing out of the wall, just to see what’s behind there....

I just moved into an older NYC building & was delighted to find my medicine cabinet equipped with the 'razor' slot. It brought back many memories of watching my dad place his used razor blade into that space. I always wondered who cleaned all those blades out?

My bathroom also has the built in laundry hamper! A blast from the past.

And in regard to 'throwing things away' - moving is an experience in recycling hell! Boxes vs. packing paper vs. bubble wrap vs. the squishy packing material...everything needs to be sorted and separated & placed in separate bins.

It takes longer to unpack than pack!

S.

"Now I filter my tap water." It's interesting, I guess that points out the progress we've actually made in a generation. It's GOOD that we see the world as smaller. Chances are if you grew up in a populated area, your water's cleaner now than it was when you were a kid. People just FELT safer then. Just look at the Hudson! Now if only we could get people to apply the concept to time as well as space (as in "global warming, I'll be dead by then, who cares?")

Mia, I had the same question. I thought, that isn't an implant, is it? ;)

as a kid i thought the blades went down into the ground below our apartment building. those were the days before recycling, when each building incinerated their garbage.

I remember one of those slits in my parent's bathroom cabinet for when men had the razors with the removable "screw in" blades. When we remodeled the bathroom, there, behind the medicine cabinet in the recessed area in the wall were about 100 rusty razor blades...a strange time capsule indeed! :)

That blob looks kind of like a deodorant stone, only too big and shiny.

We had those in our house growing up. I was always terribly interested in them too...especially because I thought of razors as being the disposable "safety razor" type...I mean, how would those fit in there?!? And, my dad used an electric razor when I was younger which confused me even more...

Things still go away...we still just plain old dispose of things. Maybe we feel bad about it, but that's about all that's changed. I don't know if this happens in more "urban" facilities, but my dad told me that on several occasions, he would see the recycling being dumped in with the rest of the trash.

In the Anthropologie at Rock Ctr yesterday, I picked up a cute shell-shaped votive holder to purchase, only to see that there was a razor blade inside! I told the poor girl manning the nearest entrance (and endured the momentary look that reflected her wondering if I were a crazy chick that went about leaving razor blades in places). I didn't realize that it might just be someone reminiscing about childhood...

i remember reading a reference to these things in a book as a child. maybe Harriet The Spy or From the Mixed Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler? and i always wondered where the blades went when you put them in there. i also wondered exactly what that sort of thing looked like -- i imagined some kind of metal fixture surrounding the hole which doesn't seem to exist after all.

i grew up in a basement-less single family home which was built in the 70's and had nothing of the sort. in fact, our house didn't even have proper medicine cabinets to house such a thing in.

so now i know. weird that none of my apartments (mostly prewar or built just after the war) here have ever had them.

My friend and I own the same floorplan of house. When she redid her bathroom and ripped out all the drywall, there was a neat, 2 foot stack of razor blades next to the stud from when you pushed them through the little slot. Sorry, no pictures, just an anecdote. I'm sure I'll find one myself when the time comes to rip out the drywall in my bathroom.

The worrying thing is, if you can push something INTO the wall through this slot, then other things can come OUT of the wall through this slot - such as creepy crawlies - urgh!!

Lynne D. - Maybe this is the answer to your razor incompatibility woes.

Oops. Link didn't display:
http://www.treehugger.com/files/2006/04/the_razor_saver.php

Very interesting rpack, I may have to get one of those. I used to shave with a straight razor, which was great. However, it takes a good amount of time to get a nice shave without lookig like a slasher victim. Straight razors are not to be rushed. Given my lack of time in the mornings I've turned to the standard Mach 3, and the shave is almost as close. I do hate buying all the blades though!

So we still don't know what that orb is in the picture? I have to admit my first thought was saline breast implant. Dunno, in case one needs a spare?!?

yah you know what came up from that hole in my old apartment? the largest cockroach i've ever seen in my life...it promptly got taped over

that's hilarious! i've seen so many of these. & always wonder what they were for. i figured maybe it was a fitting for something outdated. hahaha

That shiny orb is a deoderant rock. Now you can get it as a roll-on. It came from, I think, Thailand. I had one years ago.

Did some measuring in the apt. to be today -- I am moving deep into burb-ville -- and there was one of these in the (vile) medicine cabinet! I never would have known what it was. If I had taken that blade from Anthropologie, I would have had a place to put it.

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).

Necrothread. Razor slots in medicine cabinests. Waste stream.

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.