Monthly Archives: July 2009

Now that we’re married, we had the arduous task of combining two households into one.  When I bought the house back in 1997, I thought, “This is so big, I’ll never fill it up,” and for a couple of years, the spare bedroom was mostly vacant.  Not so.  Somewhere there’s an axiom along the lines of “junk expands to fill available space.”  It might be “gas” and one of those properties of Chemistry class, but you get the idea …

We had rented a storage unit at the end of June, well before the wedding, but it sat vacant as we had no time to get things moved into it.  Now with the end of the month  approaching and Kona paying $630 a month in rent for a townhouse that she wasn’t living in, it was time to move things into our home or into storage (only $72 per month).

James’ stuff

I am the kind of person who will collect stuff and never throw it away and then go on a cleaning binge and get rid of stuff.  Kona made it clear that she needed the spare bedroom for storage of her clothes and other things and that my stuff had to go! We hauled a multi-purpose weight / exercise type device (I’m not sure what it’s called exactly because I almost never used it), a 27″ TV, DVD player, VCR, and end-table / magazine rack / light out to the road and hung a sign that said “FREE! Got married – need to make room.”

It got a lot of smiles from people walking down the street or driving by.  It didn’t take long for the weight bench to disappear.  In fact, while we were cleaning out the house, we made trips to Kona’s townhouse to move things into storage and every time we’d come back home, something else would be gone.

I did manage to hang on to a few of my things, but they went into storage: a queen size bed, an exercise bike, the mirror for the dresser (Kona wanted to mount it — that woman is mirror crazy), my electronic keyboard, and some other things.

I ended up taking one load of my stuff to the Hope’s Attic thrift store in Decatur, the rest went into the trash or into storage.  While I was at Hope’s Attic, I saw Sharon Wilson.  Sharon and my mom were best friends when I was young and their kids spent a lot of time at each other’s homes in the 60’s and 70’s.  We briefly caught up and she was surprised, but excited, to hear that I had just gotten married … for the first time.

Kona’s stuff

Moving Kona’s stuff was more involved as everything had to go.  Her day-bed that she grew up on replaced the queen size bed, and I must admit that the room looked nice when she was done although when company comes, we only have room for one to sleep in a bed.  We also moved her bureau, china hutch, and some other furniture into the house.

Kona spent most of Monday night going through and sorting all of the material at her townhouse and didn’t get home until almost 9 pm.  I had steak, green beans, and Texas cheese toast waiting for her.  She really threw away a lot of stuff and I ended up taking two car loads of things to Hope’s Attic plus another couple of loads to storage.

The Closet

She decided that she didn’t like the closet organizer that was in the bedroom, so I pulled that out and built a closet from scratch.  The problem was that we had to move the clothes to the house so we could empty the townhouse but there was no place to put the clothes since the closet was being redone.  I built a makeshift clothes rack out of the dowel rods we had got to go in the closet, a 2″x4″ piece of wood, and a folding ladder.  It was quite the balancing act, but it managed to hold.

The closet took a lot more time than it should have.  I bought supports for the dowel rod and shelf and mounted those, but because of the asymmetric alignment of the studs in the closet, one of them was too close to the end and so mounting the support was difficult.  Somewhere along the line, I had a bag with my three most commonly used wrenches, my Allen wrench sets, lineman’s pliers, and my good Philips screwdrivers that got misplaced / lost.  So I had to go buy another set of tools to replace those and finally spent the money to get a good set.

Then we couldn’t put the dowel rod in the closet because all of the clothes were on them, so I went back to Menard’s and picked up another dowel rod to mount.   The bottom rod went much quicker and Kona says she loves the closet and that it’s the best one she’s ever had, other than the ones at the townhouse, which were just freaking huge.

After cramming the car with everything we’d need for the wedding, checking and rechecking our list of things we needed to take, we finally headed for Kewanee only to get about 1 mile away before I realized I had forgotten ALL my hang up clothes (AKA everything I’m wearing this weekend except the wedding dress!).  So, after turning around and grabbing my clothes, remembering something else we had forgotten, we finally (once again) got back on the road.  After a side trip to Cold Stone in Peoria (Does anyone see a theme here from the previous blog?? And, for the record, I said I did NOT want Cold Stone because my grandma Davis had made PeachDessert… Yet, I am weak and did have some once we got there.), we spent the rest of our trip to Kewanee going back and forth memorizing our wedding vows. We had a LOT of laughs and manage to get our own memorized as well as the other person’s (purely due to the fact that we heard the other person say it again and again and again!)

The next morning (Friday) started rainy and cold, and really put us in a lethargic mood we had to fight to keep away.  Around 8am, my brother Ty called and told us he and Austin would be there around 8:30 (they drove straight through from Cheyenne, WY), so mom and I ran to Wal-Mart to grab a few things for breakfast.  As we charged through the entrance to Wal-Mart, there was water right inside the door and mom happened to step on it just right and did the splits while falling on her side.  I was scared she had hurt herself pretty bad and the Wal-Mart lady who came running up yelling Code White*, Code White… we’ve got a Code White at the front door didn’t help things at all!! After a couple of minutes mom was able to stand up and walk a little bit, but was really sore.  Wal-Mart was great about it and the lady who came to take the report looked like she was going to cry when we told her about the wedding and needing to get things ready (i.e., mom didn’t need to be injured!).  We finally made it out of Wal-Mart, got breakfast made, and were able to greet Ty and Austin with a pretty enertaining story.

The rest of the day was spent trying (rather unsuccessfully) to keep mom from doing too much and trying to work around all the rain.  We were able to get a lot of things done, but the majority of the work really needed to be done outside! *Sigh* Yet, we managed to stay positive and focus on what could get done and luckily by mid afternoon the rain stopped and we were able get back on track.  Dinner was an interesting affair, with a number of Davis family members and a couple friends sharing in some “stories” and a lot of laughs.  We finished off the evening trying to get the detail stuff done and… with James going to Dairy Queen… didn’t I tell you there was a theme going on here! 🙂

* Code White: After hearing the lady yelling “Code White” so many times, my mom finally asked her, “What’s a ‘code white’?”.  To which she answered… “We need an ice pack”… 🙂