Monday, April 14, 2008 | by nathan

Projects: A Garden Paradise

‘Amember this?

This photo embarasses me deeply, as it shows you my tendency toward messiness, packratting and sloth in general. Also, because the most beautiful room in my house became something akin to the tag hanging off Minnie Pearl’s hat: "LOOK AT ME, I’M WHITE TRASH!" I might as well have put that dishwasher on the front lawn.

Well, this weekend, I did: we had a garage sale. Twenty minutes into it, the neighbors were coming over saying, "You guys know that the neighborhood-wide garage sale is on May 3, right?" This transformed our stress - "What do we do with the stuff that doesn’t sell?" - into joy; we took everything that didn’t move and put it into the abandoned garage next door, to be pulled out again on May 3. Yay! Problem solved. We sold most of what we’d hoped to, making a fairly-nice chunk of change in the process.

We spent the rest of the day sweeping out the room, hosing it down, getting rid of the masses of bugs that had nested back there and cleaning the windows. It was ready; it was ripe; it was pregnant with possibility.

Sunday morning we got up early and went looking at patio furniture one last time. We’d made up our minds about a favorite set at Home Depot (available for perusal at the Thomasville website, if anyone wanted to donate us the matching bar set, say), but thought, "Mah, let’s look around some."

And here it’s time for a station break, to shout from the internet rooftops the wonderfulness of my marriage by sharing a story of something that happened during that furniture search.

We stopped at a store in Oklahoma City’s furniture district that was clearly so far out of our price range. I began to get discouraged - we knew what set we liked, and the idea of spending all day looking for a set we might like 10% better for a savings of maybe $100 was frightening to me, especially when I considered the possibility that we might become paralyzed by our options, and do nothing. The time was right.

When I expressed these frustrations to Brian he was so gracious and kind to me about it that I thought perhaps Jesus had tied him up and left him in the closet at home, taken his form and decided to come furniture shopping with me. Then I realized that, no, my guy really is just that awesome.

SO ANYWAY. We went to Home Depot, decided quickly on what we wanted. The set we liked matched a rug we LURVED. Threw it in the car - had to make 2 trips because the boxes were so huge - and came home to put it all together. We made one last trip to Target and hauled an old sofa out of the den, and viola! Check it out!

So, I think you get the idea. We were very tired at the end of this project - I also dug up the plot for my garden this weekend, adding to the exhaustion - but deeply, deeply happy. We lit up some sweet-smelling incense to give the room a nice Sam-hair-free fragrance. My mom came over, bringing along a bottle of wine, and the three of us sat on the back porch, drinking wine, and bashing George W. Bush well into the night. That’s exactly what this room is for, and I have a feeling it’s going to be worth every penny, every drop of sweat, and every sore muscle. So far it already has been, and more.

Projects