Insurrection of the Doors and Drawers
All of our new cabinets and drawers in our new house have what is called “soft-closing” mechanisms. This means there’s a sweet spot from where they close themselves quietly. Very convenient if the person closing them finds the sweet spot. Useless if the person closing them doesn’t, because then they just stay open, threatening heads passing by the upper cabinets and legs walking past open drawers. After over seventy years, my husband has not acquired the skill-set to close a door or drawer.
But—pardon the pun—there are drawbacks to soft-closing drawers.
If you want to keep a drawer with soft-closing open, it will assert its right to close. You pull it open again; it tries to close again. If your hand is in the drawer, it will get pinched. Hard enough to leave a mark, because the drawer fronts are solid wood. Do you know how stupid it feels to have a fight with a drawer and lose? I do.
The soft-closing doors have one major drawback: If one is having a hissy-fit, they are impossible to slam. (Our eight-foot high, solid-core room doors slam very well, but the only one on the first floor is at the opposite end of the house, which robs the hissy-fit moment of immediacy.)
All of our toilets have soft-closing lids, too. I hate the look of an open toilet, so I’m happy to make that terribly difficult maneuver easier for the closed-lid challenged. Plus, we have two big dogs that will drink out of any open toilet, and a cat that loves to splash in an open toilet. But… The toilet lid in the first-floor powder room groans the entire time it’s closing. Loudly. It brings to mind Moaning Myrtle from the girls’ washroom at Hogwarts.
The toilet in our ensuite not only closes automatically, it opens as soon as it senses a person within its sensitive zone. It’s rather startling. For the first three months after we moved in, I felt compelled to say “Thank you,” every time it opened or closed. It also flushes automatically, which I take to be a hint to exit before the closing lid hits me. And it emotes. It chirps gaily when it opens, then hums tunelessly when sat upon. When it closes, it chimes as if either to warn that it’s shutting, or to express happiness that it’s done.
While not a door or drawer, our built-in vacuum system sighs noisily, like a bad stage actor, when it’s turned off.
Until we moved into our new house, I had no idea that appliances and storage built-ins had emotions.
© Kate Freiman 2025