We Combined a Whole House and an Apartment. Guess How Many Spatulas We Own.
A humorous exploration of duplicate items and kitchen essentials from merging two households
Seven.
The answer is seven spatulas. I'll give you a moment with that.
Not seven spatulas we need. Not seven spatulas we planned on. Seven spatulas that materialized in our kitchen the way these things always do — one at a time, across years of solo living, each one purchased at some point when the current spatula felt insufficient or temporarily missing or when there was a sale and spatulas were right there at the checkout. And then we moved in together, and suddenly we had to figure out what to do with seven spatulas between two adults who maybe flip eggs twice a week.
This is the story of combining a whole house and an apartment. It is also, unavoidably, the story of a kitchen that briefly looked like a storage unit for a very specific type of plastic implement.
How we got here
Here's what nobody tells you about living alone for an extended period of time: you replace things before they break. You think you're out of spatulas, you buy a new one, you find the old one. Repeat this process over six or eight years and you have a kitchen that could supply a mid-sized catering company.
My partner had the whole house. I had the apartment. The whole house, as it turns out, contains multiples of everything — not because the person living there is a hoarder, but because houses accumulate. There are corners and cabinets and those little spaces at the back of lower shelves where you put things you're done thinking about. Houses have enough room to absorb the slow, quiet reproduction of household objects.
The apartment was leaner, more edited. I thought I was a ruthless minimalist with a streamlined kitchen. I was not. I had four can openers.
Four.
Not one can opener, not a backup can opener, but a full rotation of can openers in various states of functionality. There was the reliable one, the travel one (I have never once traveled with a can opener in my life), the nice one someone gave me as a gift, and one that I genuinely could not identify the origin of. It was just there, among the other can openers, living its best life.
The great kitchen count
When we finally brought everything into one space and laid it out on the counter — a process I recommend as deeply humbling — the inventory looked something like this:
Two electric kettles. Three cutting boards (two of which were warped in a way that made them actively unreliable). One full set of nice pots and pans. One older set that had been demoted to 'overflow.' Four wooden spoons. Two vegetable peelers. One olive oil bottle that was mostly olive oil and one that was mostly air. Approximately forty of those reusable grocery bags that somehow breed in the backs of cabinet doors. And, of course, seven spatulas.
We also had two coffee makers. Not two different types of coffee makers — two standard drip coffee makers, purchased separately, for the same purpose, now staring at each other across the kitchen counter like rivals.
There was a moment, standing there looking at all of it, where we both started laughing. Not the polite kind of laughing. The slightly unhinged kind, where the absurdity of the situation just overtakes you and you can't help it. We were two functional adults who had arrived at this point in our lives with enough spatulas to outfit a brunch restaurant.
The rules we made (and which ones actually held)
The standard advice for combining kitchens is to go category by category and keep only the best version of each thing. This is correct and also harder in practice than it sounds, because ownership is emotional even when the item is a spatula.
"But that's my spatula." Words I actually heard myself say.
We established some ground rules. One: if it was a duplicate, we kept whichever one was objectively better. Two: 'better' had to be based on actual function, not sentimental attachment to an object that costs four dollars. Three: if neither was better and both were mediocre, this was our chance to just get one good one.
That third rule was the most useful. The merging process, as chaotic as it felt, turned out to be a genuinely good opportunity to reset. We replaced the aging cutting boards with one that actually stays flat. We donated both coffee makers and got a single one we both liked. We kept the two best wooden spoons and donated the others. We are now down to two spatulas, which feels both luxurious and responsible.
The kitchen we ended up with is quieter and easier to navigate than either of our kitchens were individually. When you're forced to make conscious decisions about every single object you own, you end up with a kitchen stocked with things you actually chose — not just things that accumulated while you weren't paying attention. For the pieces we did replace or add, we tried to find things built to last rather than things that would just join the next generation of duplicates.
A well-chosen kitchen tool is worth the extra thought — you want the one you're keeping indefinitely, not the one you'll be explaining to a partner in five years.
What we learned
The spatula situation was funny. The can opener situation was funny. The forty grocery bags were genuinely alarming. But the whole exercise, underneath the absurdity, was clarifying.
We didn't need more stuff. We needed better stuff, chosen deliberately, that worked for both of us. The merging wasn't really about subtraction — it was about editing down to the things that actually belonged in the life we were building together.
And we kept two spatulas. One for me, one for him.
Neither of us has admitted which one is better.
Pro tip: before you move in together, take a full inventory of your kitchen cabinets. Do it alone, before you see each other's. The shock of self-recognition is best processed privately.