So our Mothers of Multiples club hosted a really cool talk about couponing, how to do it, why you DON'T need 432 bottles of mustard, how to keep your wallet fat, etc. The speakers really gave us useful information and ideas, and I think while I may have a long learning curve, this is going to be really good for my finances and family in the long run. I must say, the meeting planner at this club is really impressive - she seems to come up with the best topics for our meetings. I'm quite impressed with her. In fact...oh, ok, you've figured out who it is. I'll shut up now... ;-)
Through the talk it dawned on me that the first thing I'm gonna need to make this couponing thing work is...no, scissors are the second thing, thanks...a chest or upright freezer. Otherwise, where the heck am I gonna put all this meat I bought on a crazy-good sale? Ah, but that brings us to another good question - where to put the freezer? Now in my house there are three exits. There's the front door and the back door, and there's this third door where a narrow corridor allows passage through a dark and tightly-packed cave of crap to the cars. What is this gloomy and creepy place, you might ask? Spiders and bugs lurk there, as do remnants of old baby toys, half-used bags of potting soil, forgotten Christmas decorations, the filing cabinets, and other miscellaneous items. Frankly, it's a place that we usually rush through without looking too carefully around - you never know what you'll find. My DH and I decided, however, it was time to explore this great unknown. Armed with pickaxes, shovels, guide ropes, and miners caps (complete with lights), we began our foray.
Slowly we made headway into the space. "Holy cow - we have folding chairs?" I gasped! "Hey! That's what happened to this computer shell!" my DH cried in shock. Sure enough, as we dug through the clutter around us, we uncovered gem after forgotten gem, a great deal of trash, and...oh my...could that be?...no...NO!...*Gasp!* "IT'S A FLOOR!!!" Great Googly Moogly!! We have a GARAGE!!!! You mean that thing used to shelter a car? NO WAY!!!
The cleaning continues for a couple of days as we realize the vast (well, not that vast) untapped wealth of space we have before us. Eagerly we reach in, discarding junk, placing items into donate or recycle piles, even finding items I KNEW we owned, but just couldn't figure out where it went...and sure enough, we found that we ACTUALLY had space for a FREEZER! Who knew?
Now, I'm not the kind of woman who brings in heavy pieces of furniture and has people move them from wall to wall to get a feel for how things will fit. "I'm sorry your hernia is acting up, but could you and your sciatica PLEASE move it back to that wall one more time? I think I've finally figured out where to put it." No, sorry - it's wasteful, inefficient, and most of all, the complaining is just annoying. Suck it up, muscly people - you got your workout for the day! No, instead I measure the dimensions of the room and all of the components to be placed therein. This has to be done in great detail with PRECISION. Note, I said PRECISION. Afterall, once I have all of the measurements, I figure out my scale and draw the room on graph paper (I'm sorry, have you met me? Capital "A" hyphen capital "R"). I make three or four copies of the paper and then spend time drawing in the different items in different arrangements to figure out where it goes best. Hey! Hush up! You have your fun, and I have mine. It's my engineering side finally getting to do something useful.
So my DH knows my system well, and since it means he has a lot less heavy lifting to do, he doesn't complain at all. In fact, my dad is willing to come help with both the continual clean out (turns out we have about 72 coolers - I thought we had two) and the moving of the items because he knows it will all go in ONE spot without being shifted around too much. Frankly, if I didn't graph it, he would, so it's really a form of self-defense. But I digress. I explain to my DH that the room and the items MUST be measured with PRECISION. He assures me he can be quite precise. I am still waiting to see that...perhaps it only happens during the equinox? So he goes around and measures "carefully" (his word, not mine), calling out measurements in inches. Yes, you heard me - inches! Stop interrupting!
We finish the measurements, including measuring the car (hey - did you know they have all of the specifications we needed about the PRECISE width, length, how far the doors open, etc. online? Found this out a couple of hours AFTER measuring), and head back in the house for the graphtastic fun! You won't believe what I discovered - we have so much MORE ROOM in this garage than we ever realized! In fact, there's no reason why we can't move around the van WITH THE DOORS CLOSED (did I mention we actually used this room for it's intended function at one time? No - sorry. Mommy brain). Oh Happy Day!
So after the graphing, I'm proudly studying my work, when it dawns on me that if we had this much room before...how come we couldn't move around the van back then with the door closed? How come things seemed so much more scrunched before...and that was without a freezer - oh no, wait, we had a chest freezer. Then one day we had a smell. And the smell grew...and grew...and pregnant mommy couldn't be in the garage anymore during the June before she had the babies...and not pregnant daddy developed morning sickness when discovering the cause of said smell...sorry, tangent (look at the shiny baubles!). So why didn't this work before?...huh....
I said to DH, "Does something seem off to you?" He checks the drawings. "Yeah, the water heater area isn't that big...and that wall seems to long...and the garage definitely didn't have that much excess space around the van..." So I said to him, "That's what I'm thinking, too. What do you think is the problem here?" So after a moment of quiet study, he says, "When you put in that measurement, did it include the distance from the door to the wall, or just the size of the door?" I said, "I don't know - you measured it. What did you do?" He says, "I estimated." ....estimated?...Estimated?...ESTIMATED?!?!? WHAT?!?!? He shrugs. "I was trying to get it done fast so we could go to bed." "BUT YOU TOLD ME YOU WERE BEING PRECISE." "Oh." he says, "Precision...estimation...what's the difference?"
About three feet, it turns out. THREE FEET! Guess what? We can't walk around the van when the garage door is closed. The freezer, worktable, and bikes are about to get a LOT cozier! And you can forget the luxurious space between shelves! And you don't get to measure in the cool-ishness of the evening. No way, buddy. You mess with my precision, you re-measure in the heat of the afternoon! Yeah! With the sun shining in. Take that, Mr. "Guesstimation!"
Oh, can you just see us now rearranging the garage? It's going to be a fun time for sure! Fortunately I do love him very much, but you can ask my students - I am the master of tough love! ;-) I'll let you know how he fairs.
Oh, and Lowes has many of their appliances on sale - we got a good upright freezer for under $400 with a temperature ALARM, security lock (for the babies, thank you - he's still allowed in there), and small footprint to fit in my garage that is MISSING THREE FEET. It will be delivered tomorrow (Sunday).
Through the talk it dawned on me that the first thing I'm gonna need to make this couponing thing work is...no, scissors are the second thing, thanks...a chest or upright freezer. Otherwise, where the heck am I gonna put all this meat I bought on a crazy-good sale? Ah, but that brings us to another good question - where to put the freezer? Now in my house there are three exits. There's the front door and the back door, and there's this third door where a narrow corridor allows passage through a dark and tightly-packed cave of crap to the cars. What is this gloomy and creepy place, you might ask? Spiders and bugs lurk there, as do remnants of old baby toys, half-used bags of potting soil, forgotten Christmas decorations, the filing cabinets, and other miscellaneous items. Frankly, it's a place that we usually rush through without looking too carefully around - you never know what you'll find. My DH and I decided, however, it was time to explore this great unknown. Armed with pickaxes, shovels, guide ropes, and miners caps (complete with lights), we began our foray.
Slowly we made headway into the space. "Holy cow - we have folding chairs?" I gasped! "Hey! That's what happened to this computer shell!" my DH cried in shock. Sure enough, as we dug through the clutter around us, we uncovered gem after forgotten gem, a great deal of trash, and...oh my...could that be?...no...NO!...*Gasp!* "IT'S A FLOOR!!!" Great Googly Moogly!! We have a GARAGE!!!! You mean that thing used to shelter a car? NO WAY!!!
The cleaning continues for a couple of days as we realize the vast (well, not that vast) untapped wealth of space we have before us. Eagerly we reach in, discarding junk, placing items into donate or recycle piles, even finding items I KNEW we owned, but just couldn't figure out where it went...and sure enough, we found that we ACTUALLY had space for a FREEZER! Who knew?
Now, I'm not the kind of woman who brings in heavy pieces of furniture and has people move them from wall to wall to get a feel for how things will fit. "I'm sorry your hernia is acting up, but could you and your sciatica PLEASE move it back to that wall one more time? I think I've finally figured out where to put it." No, sorry - it's wasteful, inefficient, and most of all, the complaining is just annoying. Suck it up, muscly people - you got your workout for the day! No, instead I measure the dimensions of the room and all of the components to be placed therein. This has to be done in great detail with PRECISION. Note, I said PRECISION. Afterall, once I have all of the measurements, I figure out my scale and draw the room on graph paper (I'm sorry, have you met me? Capital "A" hyphen capital "R"). I make three or four copies of the paper and then spend time drawing in the different items in different arrangements to figure out where it goes best. Hey! Hush up! You have your fun, and I have mine. It's my engineering side finally getting to do something useful.
So my DH knows my system well, and since it means he has a lot less heavy lifting to do, he doesn't complain at all. In fact, my dad is willing to come help with both the continual clean out (turns out we have about 72 coolers - I thought we had two) and the moving of the items because he knows it will all go in ONE spot without being shifted around too much. Frankly, if I didn't graph it, he would, so it's really a form of self-defense. But I digress. I explain to my DH that the room and the items MUST be measured with PRECISION. He assures me he can be quite precise. I am still waiting to see that...perhaps it only happens during the equinox? So he goes around and measures "carefully" (his word, not mine), calling out measurements in inches. Yes, you heard me - inches! Stop interrupting!
We finish the measurements, including measuring the car (hey - did you know they have all of the specifications we needed about the PRECISE width, length, how far the doors open, etc. online? Found this out a couple of hours AFTER measuring), and head back in the house for the graphtastic fun! You won't believe what I discovered - we have so much MORE ROOM in this garage than we ever realized! In fact, there's no reason why we can't move around the van WITH THE DOORS CLOSED (did I mention we actually used this room for it's intended function at one time? No - sorry. Mommy brain). Oh Happy Day!
So after the graphing, I'm proudly studying my work, when it dawns on me that if we had this much room before...how come we couldn't move around the van back then with the door closed? How come things seemed so much more scrunched before...and that was without a freezer - oh no, wait, we had a chest freezer. Then one day we had a smell. And the smell grew...and grew...and pregnant mommy couldn't be in the garage anymore during the June before she had the babies...and not pregnant daddy developed morning sickness when discovering the cause of said smell...sorry, tangent (look at the shiny baubles!). So why didn't this work before?...huh....
I said to DH, "Does something seem off to you?" He checks the drawings. "Yeah, the water heater area isn't that big...and that wall seems to long...and the garage definitely didn't have that much excess space around the van..." So I said to him, "That's what I'm thinking, too. What do you think is the problem here?" So after a moment of quiet study, he says, "When you put in that measurement, did it include the distance from the door to the wall, or just the size of the door?" I said, "I don't know - you measured it. What did you do?" He says, "I estimated." ....estimated?...Estimated?...ESTIMATED?!?!? WHAT?!?!? He shrugs. "I was trying to get it done fast so we could go to bed." "BUT YOU TOLD ME YOU WERE BEING PRECISE." "Oh." he says, "Precision...estimation...what's the difference?"
About three feet, it turns out. THREE FEET! Guess what? We can't walk around the van when the garage door is closed. The freezer, worktable, and bikes are about to get a LOT cozier! And you can forget the luxurious space between shelves! And you don't get to measure in the cool-ishness of the evening. No way, buddy. You mess with my precision, you re-measure in the heat of the afternoon! Yeah! With the sun shining in. Take that, Mr. "Guesstimation!"
Oh, can you just see us now rearranging the garage? It's going to be a fun time for sure! Fortunately I do love him very much, but you can ask my students - I am the master of tough love! ;-) I'll let you know how he fairs.
Oh, and Lowes has many of their appliances on sale - we got a good upright freezer for under $400 with a temperature ALARM, security lock (for the babies, thank you - he's still allowed in there), and small footprint to fit in my garage that is MISSING THREE FEET. It will be delivered tomorrow (Sunday).
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