When I was a kid, the absolute best thing in the world was building a fort in the back yard out of cardboard boxes. We lived two blocks from an appliance store and they were always putting boxes out for trash pickup. I guess my brothers and I were the trash pickup because we dragged home every box that was in halfway decent shape. Much to my parents' glee - and dismay - our backyard was regularly transformed into a maze of little brown buildings, augmented by lawn chairs and pine straw. We had a blast pretending to be settlers in the wild west or astronauts on a space ship exploring like the folks on Star Trek did.
We stayed out of Mom and Dad's hair for hours and days on end, only to wind up with a big, brown, soggy mess when it rained. Then the lump of formerly glorious cardboard would be hauled out to our own trashpile and wait for pickup.
This past week, I got my own toy. A lovely, big treadmill with a control panel on it to rival any Star Trek episode. It's a tool for training (and I LOVE my treadmill) and losing weight. And it came in a great big cardboard box!
Since our backyard is full of leaves and sweet gum balls, dogs and poo, my livingroom became the playground.
It was fun for a day or two. A great thing to have on a chilly Thursday night when Kylee came over and they turned it into a part of a house. The kids played with it all evening.
Still, there comes a time when you look at your livingroom and sigh. At least that time came for me. The treadmill is huge and took up almost all available floor space in my family room, so I wanted to move the couch into the livingroom - only with the land speeder in there, there was no room.
It's not exactly "House Beautiful" here. There's landspeeder in the middle of the room, materials harvested from the king-sized mattress I disassembled a couple of weeks ago, miscellaneous tables that were holding plants during the freezing portion of our winter... A broken chair (upside down) that needs to be fixed, and its mate that doesn't know what to do without it's broken-legged friend. Oh, and my tower fan which really doesn't know where to go now.
Darling Man began the restoration this morning. The speeder was taken apart and restored to just being a cardboard box. My mattress materials went into the box, was taped up and moved to the garage. The excess tables were removed and dispersed to other parts of the house, the floor vaccummed and the couch was moved in to await restoration.
The family room makes a little more sense now - at least we can walk through it without tripping on anything and the living room looks semi-civilized at the moment with the cushion-less couch sitting under the window.
Project Couch will begin shortly. Old furniture is MY favorite toy.
1 comment:
This takes me back because my boy would live for weeks in a giant fridge box in the living room.
Good times!
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