Last week, we talked about the most useful or thoughtful unexpected gift you received for your wedding.  As couples are putting together their wedding registries, it may seem like some items are unnecessary or frivolous.  However, once you and your spouse have established a home together, you might one day be surprised by how useful some common staples of registries are.  After doing some research, we were able to compile some of the best gift recommendations people responded with.

What was the best wedding gift from your registry?

Good towels are actually nice. Took me a few years to realize it though.  That said, good wine glasses, if you drink wine. A drill press. A good coffee grinder. Barbecue tools.

I do a ton of baking, and my Gram got me a Kitchen-Aid Stand mixer, one of the medium almost industrial sized ones… I use it at least once a week. LOVE IT!

A PS3. I insisted that it be on the registry. It gets used every day vs the never that the crepe making pan my wife wanted and put on the registry.

If you guys plan on cooking in the least, a good set of pots and pans.

When we were starting out, we were very poor. I had to pay for the whole wedding, for instance ($1000 was all we could afford). One of the gifts we got was two of my wife’s sisters got together and made a collection of every small thing one might need to start a kitchen: slotted spoons, dish rack, decanters for juice, peeler, dish towels, measuring cups, and so on. They left the cutlery sets, flatware, dinnerware, and pots and pans to the other wedding people. I think they spent only $60 of 1980s money, but we got this huge washtub filled with all this.. incredibly useful stuff.  We got a set of dishes that all broke within a few years. Most of the non-stick pans and such stuff fell apart after about 10 years. But damn if more than half of the stuff in that “kitchen gift tub” isn’t still around to this day, some 23 years later. A $3 plastic ladle from Wal-Mart outlasted all our Visions Corning pots. Oven mitts don’t go bad. Wind up timer shaped like a tomato? Still works.  Best gift ever.

Cordless drill. I wore the thing out after 7 years, but it was well used.

One thing we spent wedding money on was a nice turkish carpet. We walk on it every day, of course, but it became a centerpiece for the living room.

All of the basic stuff seems boring and useless until you realize how much it would cost to stock your kitchen and bathroom by yourself. My wife and I use our serving platters and dinnerware much more than I anticipated. Now that we’re married, when we have people over it’s usually other couples and I never would have had enough servingware or place settings.

Useful: Bedding, Linens, Kitchen appliances. Useless: vases, other decor items that have no practical use.  When I was poor, I bought a cheap lamp for a friends wedding (it was on their registry), and they made a point of mentioning that they use it all the time, even years after the wedding.  The wedding gifts we use are a salt and pepper shaker, and a tea kettle. We had lived together for a few years prior to the wedding, so we had lots of stuff already.  One thing we have learned is to get glassware from Ikea. It may not be all that fancy, but it is rarely discontinued, and if you break a few, you can easily buy replacements for cheap.

Crockpot… especially if you both work longish hours it makes life so much easier. I love to cook but there are many times when I rock the set it and forget about it until I get home kind of dinner.

Personally I think one set of china is more than enough. I had a fancy set on my registry since I already had an everyday set, have all of 2 place settings of the high end stuff and it has never come out of the box. A few years later I asked for a nice mid-range set of Lenox for christmas to replace my everyday cheap stoneware that was having issues and I use that for everything.

Pampered Chef Stoneware, specifically, the pizza stone.

Stainless steel cookware. We use it at least three nights per week, and it’s so versatile. Make sure to get them with oven safe lids–I think ours are rated to 350, but the pans themselves are rated higher.

A rice cooker.  Do you eat a lot of rice? If so, get one. If not, you will begin eating much more rice.

I’m a big coffee drinker, so I’m pretty fond of my nifty espresso maker. The best thing we got from our registry was a nice casserole dish and a shitload of glasses. The casserole dish is pretty versatile and definitely comes in handy. I’m an extremely clumsy person, so we go through a lot of glassware. Our wedding helped us re-up for a bit.

It’s a cliche, but I love the toaster I got from my registry, and use it every day.

Things that were not useful that we got were crystal vases and bowls. We’ve been married for years and they have never left the boxes they came in.

If you don’t already have one register for a good quality, easy to manipulate cutting board. I recommend bamboo, actually, over the traditional fancy (and heavy) maple — less worry about warping, very light, and very durable without being too hard on your knives. We got several for our wedding, but we USE the bamboo most of all.

If my house was on fire I would probably grab my melamine mixing bowl set before anything else! Probably would throw wine opening tools in there too.