Here is my current station in life: My main bathtub is filled with old high school annuals, photo albums, a box with all my shoes, and wrapping paper. There is a parakeet in a cage in my guest bathroom. My guest room bed is disassembled and leaning against a wall, and is also where my home office is where I have worked remote for much of the last nine months, so my desk is currently wedged in a small open space where my chair barely fits since the bed now takes up the place where my office used to live.
Yay! for new carpet!
Yes, we are getting new carpet, and we a ton of stuff we have to move out of the way, and disassemble some of the beds in the house. Our guest bedroom has a poster bed with slats that was my wife’s grandmother’s, and it would apparently cost us an extra $60 for the installers to move it. Thus, the temporary inconvenience. We didn’t even bother to ask what it would cost to move a shelf that was anchored with boxes of old photos and albums.
My wife and I originally talked about moving everything downstairs for the installation, then we both remembered that we have stairs and not an escalator, and so we started trying to find as many places upstairs when we started moving stuff.
We started with our main closet. First step was to package up all of my shoes. Now, I am not a big shoe guy. Or so I thought. I have a few pairs of shoes for work. And then a few nice dress shoes I can wear with a suit or tuxedo. And then some hiking shoes. And some tennis shoes. And some boots. And cleats. And suddenly I realize I am becoming Imelda Marcos. (Congrats to me for a joke that would have really zinged on a late 1980s talk show monologue.)
Next I moved on to a shelf we have in the closet that has a bunch of old photo albums and high school yearbooks. Fun fact: Those. Are. Heavy. I am not sure what they made high school yearbooks out of in the late 80s, but iron was clearly a major component.
Once I moved all of these boxes to our main bathroom, I set my eyes on our guest room closet. Our guest room closet has become a convenient storage place for a few things, namely gift wrapping paper. As I hauled bag after bag to the bathtub storage facility, I told my wife, “OK, most of this cannot go back into storage.” She agreed. If everyone who reads this column would like us to wrap their presents, we can probably accommodate you. I mean, we won’t, for myriad reasons, but just saying we COULD….
We are getting close to having the floors prepped, and once the new carpet is installed, we will be looking forward to putting things back that deserve to be put back. Gift wrapping paper will most likely be pared down substantially. My shoes? Probably need to do some soul searching about whether I need three pairs of cleats still, seeing as how I haven’t played competitive sports in years. And the parakeet? Probably should move that back into my son’s room.
Mike Gibbons was born and raised in Aiken, S.C. A graduate of the University of Alabama, you can e-mail him at scmgibbons@gmail.com or follow him on Twitter @StandardMike.