We bought a new dresser last weekend. So what, you say? If you're one of those who just said that, well maybe you hadn't considered the ramifications of such a purchase. The very fabric of my universe has been torn asunder. Well, not exactly torn, and I had to look up exactly what asunder means, and it turns out that it sounds much worse than it really is which is "apart." Suffice it to say that things were more asunder than usual in our house after we bought that dresser.
First, and perhaps most importantly, it was a replacement dresser for the one that had been in our bedroom for several years which meant that the new one had to take its place just below the television and right next to the door to the bathroom. Again, this might seem insignificant to you, but once you realize that this space was formerly occupied and could no longer be occupied by a dresser of roughly the same size, perhaps you start to realize the tension that we had unwittingly created. The old dresser had to go somewhere else, and most of the dresser-sized places we had in our house were already chock full of dressers. Since we are not the type of family who simply put their old furniture out on the curb with a "free" sign on it, rather we are the type of family that tends to find other people's old furniture out on the curb with a "free" sign on it and we drag it home with every intent of giving it a good home. Which might explain the appalling lack of dresser-sized spaces in our household. It became our mission to shuffle all of these furniture elements into a mix that would remain functional and allow us not to drag anything off the premises.
That meant the dinosaur of an entertainment center that had been with us since we first put it together from a kit consisting of slabs of black particle board, dowels and a few strategically placed screws had to be moved to the basement. My wife and I achieved this without taking it apart, unless you count removing the glass doors from the upper shelf that never fully worked in the first place. Into the back room moved my old dresser, where it was reunited with the beast of a TV that it used to hold up back in the days when the cathode ray tube ruled the roost. The drawer that had once had the challenge of holding the vast array of sports-related T-shirts was now relieved of that duty. The rest of the drawers, from socks to concert shirts were emptied as well. They would become filled with back room bric-a-brac, again the kind of stuff that might make it to someone else's "free" box. But not ours.
That's because that's not the way we do things. That new dresser was a virtual hand in the face of Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier. Talk to the hand, Antoine. There will be no wasted space here. Even if that means we have to buy another dresser, just to prove our point. Don't tempt us. We're just crazy enough to try it. Crazy like a fox. Or a whole group of foxes, which I believe is a skulk. Feel free to look it up.
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