9/17/08

Many people spend Labor day weekend having one last cookout, enjoying time with friends or traveling to see family.  This year we spent Labor day having the biggest clean out in Blandford family history.  

It all began with my white shelf.  Currey has hated this thing since he put it together.  I bought it my second year at ACU and Currey and Wes Jones put it together.  It was $20 at Wal-mart and not incredibly sturdy but it was great storage in our kitchen that year.  The following year I moved to a house and used it for books and all my frames and decor.  Somewhere in the move the knobs that hold the shelves in place went missing so we used wooden rods to stabilize the shelves.  

It then made the trek to Illinois where it had the same role at my new apartment.  By the time Currey and I got married and the shelf came to Moody it had seen MUCH better days.  The back was no longer attached but I could not part with this "piece" that I had for so long.  When we moved to Bridgeport Currey begged me to get rid of the nasty thing as I had more than gotten my money's worth.  But I saw it as extra storage and insisted it made another move.  When we left Bridgeport we got rid of our dresser (something that cost far more than my shelf!) and decided to get fabric boxes and use my shelf as a type of dresser.  This comforted my inner pack rat as keeping it for this long had finally served so purpose besides hold picture frames.   We made it over a year and I will admit that it was one of the worst ideas I ever had.  The boxes didn't fit well and it was a total hassle.  I took the Friday of the long weekend off and that morning I uttered words Currey thought he would never hear.  "We HAVE to get rid of that shelf!"  And those few words created the biggest mess of our married life.  

Getting rid of the shelf required that we get dressers.  But the dressers wouldn't fit where the shelf had been.  So since we were rearranging anyway why not move the bed, which required us to move the desk, which required us to move the bookshelves.   And the bookshelves were so full of books that we decided we needed to go through the books to see if there were any we could get rid of.  And now since we have dressers we can take some clothes out of the closet.  Shouldn't we go through our closets?  It's been awhile.  I could go on and on but I'm sure you get the idea.  And this was the end result!

It was a HUGE project that ate up most of our weekend but it feels so good to be cleaned out and much more organized.  I'd say that my $20 investment paid off over 6 years!