Sunday, February 24, 2008

Training Them Up. . .

I confess, I am like the humane society for furniture. I can't stand to see a poor lonely table, bookshelf or other perfectly nice piece of furniture abandoned by a dumpster. So I take them in to my home--clean them up, give them a nice warm, dry place to stay and when Jack puts his foot down and says, "No more. They've got to go!" I try to find good homes for them.

So you can imagine my delight and Jack's consternation when the 8 apartment buildings behind ours all vacated for remodeling at the same time, leaving heaping mounds of nice furniture in and around the dumpster outside my kitchen window.

Every day, I dragged my girls back there to look through the piles which for me yielded a nice big area rug, a heavy-duty double head oscillating fan, a brand new wooden wall shelf, two toy storage shelves, a sturdy coloring table for the girls' room, about 50 unused plastic hangers and one nice, functional faux-leather recliner which the girls helped me drag across the parking lot, out the gap in the fence, across the weedy clumpy patch of city land, across the bark-chip landscaping, across our lawn, down the sidewalk into our living room where I lovingly cleaned out the grass and dirt clods from the bottom and scrubbed and sanitized the upholstery so that it was shiny new. I was proud of my finds, as well as my restraint in leaving so many other poor abandoned treasures behind.

The next day, Jack's partner was over for their morning planning pow-wow and coffee. Naturally, he noticed the new recliner and commented on it. Proudly, Hannah reached up and pointed out the kitchen window toward the pile of furniture and stated, "Yeah. My Mom shops back there!"

2 comments:

Kara Jo said...

I love it--I'm laughing out loud!

NoOtherName said...

Hail, O Queen of Thrift! I can just see you and the girls heaving that thing through the hole in the fence--too funny!