The Pencil Sharpener

Pencil Sharpener

I find wall-mounted pencil sharpeners, like the kind I remember seeing in elementary school, in many houses. They are often in the basement stairs, but sometimes they show up in bedroom closets too. It’s a fun game that I like to play when showing homes – find the pencil sharpener!

Why did so many people have a commercial grade pencil sharpener? I don’t understand. Do you have one in your house right now? Did you have one growing up? And if you did have one, why? Were you really that serious about homework? Did you run an illegal standardized testing center? How many pencils need to sharpened?

I just don’t get it…

8 thoughts on “The Pencil Sharpener

  1. Had one growing up and wish I had one now. If you see any lying around let me know, will you? Ha.

  2. Always love seeing these when I show houses – you know it’s got good bones and is a decent house when there is a tried and true pencil sharpener still standing. It’s usually on basement staircase – I agree.

  3. We had one growing up. Top of the basement/side entrance stairs, next to the wall of coat hooks. Six kids = lots of pencils to sharpen.

  4. We had one growing up that had a suction base. You would bring it out from the cabinet, then flip this little lever and it would stay stuck to the counter while you sharpened.

    When we bought our house, I ordered one for the basement. It is semi-permanately mounted on the work bench. It is a requirement for all modest DIYers. also, very useful for crayon sharpening. 🙂

  5. Kyle, when I was a kid in the 60’s and early 70’s we could not use pens in school or for homework(a computer was some huge thing that NASA had) and so we had lots of pencils to sharpen. Further, nobody had an electric pencil sharpener (though I imagine they were around). So we all had pencil sharpeners that looked like this.

  6. We had one in our Pantry. It was used all the time in our house because we made so many mistakes on our homework. i want one for my house because all the hand held sharpeners.

  7. We had one when I was a kid in the pantry, too. And yeah, I wish I had one now–the little handheld guys are pathetic compared to the wall-mounted machine.

  8. Jen, you can still get the old school ones very easily on Amazon, or at your local office supply place. I got mine from Amazon, it works great.

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