What Is the Finnish Cleaning Method?
This Hack Will Change the Way You Dry Dishes, and We're Mad We Didn't Think of It Ourselves
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How many times have you thought to yourself while placing your just-washed dishes on the drying rack, "Wow, I wish I had more counter space"? Or maybe you're someone, like me, whose clean dishes never fully make it from the rack to the cabinet. Your perpetually "drying" tableware instead becomes a permanent fixture on the kitchen counter until they're picked up and used again.
Thankfully, there's a brilliant Finnish life hack to drying your dishes, cups, and utensils that can majorly cut down on time and energy and help remedy all of the above. Maybe the best part? It can easily create more space in your home (why are apartment kitchens so notoriously tiny?) without making any major changes.
The cleaning gadget is called astiankuivauskaappi, which roughly translates from Finnish to "dish drying cabinet" in English, and it cleverly utilises an over-the-sink storage cabinet that has a drying rack built in. The simple trick? The bottom of the cabinet is open, so you can skip a step and put the wet dishes right into the cabinet and let it drip-dry into the sink or onto the counter. Just be sure to leave the cabinet doors open until the items are fully dry so it doesn't become an ideal place for mold to start growing.
Interested in giving this helpful cleaning hack a go? While this way of getting dishes done hasn't become hugely popular in the United States just yet, you can still pick up some simple Amazon products to help re-create your own dish-drying cabinet alternative at home. For instance, this iPegtop Over-the-Sink Drying Rack ($21) is great for small spaces, and this Probrico Dish-Drying Rack ($45) can easily be installed in your kitchen cabinets.
