There’s a particular kind of satisfaction that comes from cleaning something nobody will ever notice. Not performative tidiness, not the kind of clean you do before guests arrive. The kind where you fix something that was broken in secret, and only you know it’s fixed.

I’ve been thinking about this after falling down a thread about kitchen cabinet tops. Someone moved into a rental, looked up, and found the kind of grease buildup that suggests the previous tenants had been frying things since approximately the Howard era. That sticky orange layer, half dust and half rendered fat, that forms when nobody ever looks up.

There’s a particular kind of catastrophe that isn’t dangerous, isn’t expensive in any serious way, and isn’t going to make the news. It’s just quietly, completely awful. Thirty ounces of caramel sauce into a kitchen cabinet is that kind of catastrophe.

Someone posted about this recently and the thread that followed was one of the more honest corners of the internet I’ve stumbled into. The community’s considered advice, delivered with great solemnity, was essentially: you cannot fix this. This is your life now. A few people suggested burning the building down, which is funny until you remember the person is a renter with a roach problem, at which point it becomes a little less funny and a little more relatable.

I came across a post the other day that stopped me mid-scroll. Someone had stayed up all night cleaning their room – something they hadn’t properly tackled in years – and they were buzzing with pride about it. Their sister had helped move furniture, and the transformation had them feeling like a weight had been lifted off their shoulders.

There’s something deeply relatable about that feeling, isn’t there? We’ve all been there – that moment when you finally tackle the thing you’ve been avoiding, and suddenly you can breathe again.

Been scrolling through Reddit again during my lunch break, and stumbled across one of those posts that hits way too close to home. Someone desperately trying to track down a mysterious stench in their kitchen - that awful combination of death, rotting food, and something that might charitably be described as digestive distress. The poor soul had already done the full forensic investigation routine: removed everything, wiped down every surface, sniffed every container. Still nothing.

Walking through David Jones the other day, I spotted a gleaming white Le Creuset Dutch oven on display, instantly reminding me of the day I made what seemed like an absolutely mad purchase seven years ago. Five hundred dollars for a pot? Past me must have been temporarily insane.

The sight sparked an interesting reflection on how we value quality and longevity in our everyday items. Back then, I was a uni student, and dropping that kind of money on cookware seemed completely ridiculous. I remember justifying it to myself: “It’s an investment piece,” I said, probably sounding like every other millennial trying to rationalise an expensive purchase.