As you all know, I have been working from home off and on for a couple of years, and one of the first things I ran into when making that transition was trying to set-up my home office. Office furniture is prohibitively expensive in a lot of cases (can we really afford a $300 filing cabinet?) but I didn’t like the look of the junk picked up from the side of the road either. So what did we do? Well, we got lucky. We went to a field of clovers and picked all of the four leaf ones that we could find and closing our eyes real tight, whispered, “There’s no place like my office, there’s no place like my office,” and clicked our shoes together.
Wait, or was that something else?
Well, regardless, we got lucky when we went garage saling. My mother-in-law is the queen of garage sales, and she led us to one where we found a sturdy, black, in mint condition TV stand. The guy was at the end of his rope (he just wanted this stuff GONE!) and so he gave it to us for free. We gladly took it. We used it for a year or so as a TV stand until we were able to buy an entertainment center, at which point we relegated it to the storage room. As I was trying to figure out how to populate my office with furniture, the first thing I did was raid the storage room. When I looked at, trying to imagine the possibilities, I figured well, if the stand could hold a TV, it could surely hold my itty-bitty inkjet printer, so I dug it out. I also had a cute corkboard given to me by my sister as a present for my birthday in there, so I pulled that out too. Love that storage closet.
Also at garage sales: Two different lamps – one a table lamp, and one a floor lamp. Both in perfect condition, and both under $5. I don’t think I’ll ever buy a lamp at the store again.
Our luck didn’t stop there, however.
Next, my husband brought home a filing cabinet from work because his boss was cleaning out the old filing cabinets and buying some newer, nicer ones. My hubby called me and asked me if I wanted a four-drawer filing cabinet, and I enthusiastically said yes. (Ca-ching! Just saved myself $300, or more!) I was soon regretting that impulse. There, in the back of our truck, was this hunk of junk that had originally been a metallic gray but was now more brown than gray from the rust covering the sides of it. I looked at the cabinet, then looked at the hubby. For once in my life (and I do mean once) I was speechless.
Part Two, where my husband shows me he can imagine the possibilities that I’m just missing.