You know, I promised myself when I got married that I wouldn’t become one of those wives that tries to control what my husband does all the time: what he eats, where he goes, what he wears, etc. So far I’ve done pretty good I think, but this last weekend there was one issue where I had had enough. Fortunately, he agreed so I didn’t feel too much like a control freak, HA!
The thing is, for the entire 10 months that we’ve been married, he’s not had anywhere to put his clean clothes. We ended up getting an extra laundry basket that we had registered for but instead of returning the extra we decided that would be a good place for him to keep his clean clothes. This is an example, and it is even missing one full load so it’s not as full as it usually is after we finish laundry!
Anyways, this system worked fine at first but since we keep it on top of the dryer, it was frequently in the way when we tried to do laundry. I especially had a hard time getting around it and the mountain of clothes would often fall over, making it sometimes hard to know what was clean and what was dirty. I tend to err on the side of caution so I’m pretty sure I rewash a bunch of clean clothes!
So anyways, John and I agreed it was time to get a dresser or a chest of drawers. Quite frankly, I still don’t know the difference between the two, except a chest is apparently cheaper. So a chest it was! I found one at Wal-Mart that was about $100 then found one around the aisle corner that was less fancy but $40 less. Non-fancy, do-it-yourself furniture it is!
I brought it home and this weekend we finally got the chance to put it together. The irony is that as we were really realizing just how many pieces there were (I’d say hundreds of pieces between all the hardware and fake wood and plastic innards), a commercial came on TV for a regional furniture store that was selling a ready-made chest of the same size for um, $20 less than what I had just paid for this thing we were having to put together! I changed the channel, needless to say.
We worked together on almost the entire project, but I will readily admit that John did the majority of the work. My primary duty was reading the directions (which was tricky considering there were pictures, not words) and handing him parts. And of course, our cats decided to make it a family project!
Colby just inspected John’s work
Missy girl must have decided he wasn’t doing something right. 
We spent several hours putting together most of the drawers and the entire frame but it was the wee hours of the morning at this point (teach us to start something like that at 11 p.m.!) so we took a break and decided to finish the next day. After all, our “helpers” were tuckered out!
So we piled up all the pieces and put them off to the side and stumbled off to bed
The next day we both slept in (we had gone to church the night before, which makes it nice to be able to sleep in on Sunday mornings!). We got up and while I cleaned and made enchiladas, enchilada lasagna and my “Mexican rice concoction,” John set to finishing the dresser. The wonderful man finished it himself and I have to admit, it probably went even faster for him not having me or the cats to help.
We got it moved into place in our bedroom and for a cheapo piece of DIY furniture, it doesn’t look half bad!
What’s even better is, the top of our dryer now looks like this:
So I’m loving it. The funny/bad thing is, you know all those clean clothes from the picture above? They’re still in the basket. The drawers of our new furniture are completely empty and so far it’s only been used as a place for our cats to sleep.
Oh well, that will give us a nice project NEXT weekend!