The end of this month means the end of my first apartment’s lease and through my first year of living on my own, I have learned a lot about what it means to be independent. Although my housemates and I have gone through many struggles with our apartment (mostly due to terrible management), there is one issue that we consistently struggled with throughout the school year: doing dishes.

This is not to say that my apartment is messy; we are relatively clean people and keep the common areas organized. However, the main problem that our dishes dilemma originated from is that we have too many people over. There are four girls on the lease who all have significant others and are heavily involved in our orgs on campus. This means that our S/Os and friends come over often to hang out or study. Too many people over means that everyone eats, which is how our dishes accumulate. On the days we cook at home are the worst for our kitchen sink; there are pots and pans sitting on the side and plates piled up in the sink. We’ll clear out the sink and have our kitchen free of dirty dishes, but that will only last so long. By the end of the day our sink will be full again.

I’m sure this is something everyone has to experience, but for us the dishes became our worst enemy. We never really had a set system, we simply tried to hold ourselves accountable for our own dirty dishes in hopes that we’d do them daily. Unfortunately, this plan had many flaws. As college students, we would be too busy to check up on our dishes, allowing them to pile up. Sometimes we would forget whose dishes are whose and this would cause issues between the house. We’d point fingers and make accusations that came up empty. Honestly, this irritated me. Some of my housemates would simply not to the dishes if they were certain it wasn’t theirs, and in some cases they were wrong. The dish was theirs! I would have to call everyone in the kitchen and make us do the dishes together. Fortunately, now that shelter-in-place is in full swing and many students have gone home, there are less people in my apartment and less dishes to worry about.

Find some quick dish washing tips here.