Sometimes a concatenation of blessings can leave me feeling less than beatific.
Blessings #1-5 are each spaced three years apart. There's a lot to like about that spacing, but it means that I always have lots of hand-me-down clothing in storage. If they had arrived every year or two, more of the clothes would be in dressers, not storage.
We are also blessed to live in a cozy yellow house built in 1923. People didn't build many closets into their houses in the 1920s. For part of its life this house was a two-flat, with a family downstairs and a pair of college students upstairs. (Sometimes they even had a renter in the basement, which astonishes me.) The renters had their own entrance, a side door with steps leading straight upstairs.
I used to store clothes in the basement. Then I stored clothes in the room over the porch that has since become the Lego hideout. I decided I'd use the back steps for my sewing/knitting things and for clothes storage. I bought big storage tubs and balanced them on styrofoam blocks. This worked fine for a while, and then my styrofoam blocks started collapsing under the weight of the tubs.
It was ugly.
I didn't even know how to tackle it. What could I use to support the tubs that would be exactly 16 inches tall and not too hazardous if it toppled down the stairs? How much time was it going to take to sort out those spilled bags? How many spiders would bite me on the ankle while I was knee-deep in cast-off clothing?
Elwood sawed a 4x4x8 into 6 lengths for me. (He thinks I should do my own sawing, but I pulled a Bartleby the scrivener and he did it for me with only a little eye-rolling.)
Like most tasks that I put off, it was a drag but not nearly as bad as I had feared. I tidied up the sewing table (if "tidying" means "swept the mending out of sight" in your personal lexicon, as it does in mine) and I cannot walk by the top of the stairs without an inner huzzah. It looks so nice now!
But if those 4x4 pieces start collapsing under the bins, I'll really know that I'm holding on to too much clothing.
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