Thoughts on Old Chairs, Scooters, and Payback.

We cleaned the front room on Thursday.

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Seriously. I made lists for every room in the house that included things like...

wash baseboards and trim.

dust fans.

wash mirror.

wash window and tracks.

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We only finished the front room.

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Well, to be fair, Fred turned the mountain of stuff in our bedroom into a molehill, and Bob and Chuck cleaned most of the bathroom to earn rights to go to a friend's house, but the front room got fi.nished.

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I even repainted the wall behind the bark-a-lounger (barkalaounger, right?) where it's been gouged every time we recline the awful chair.

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And...

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I tossed the barkalounger to the curb. As in drug it out to the gravel (since we don't exactly have a curb) along with the fabric I bought to recover it (yeah, that happened) and slapped a

FREE CHAIR

sign on it.

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Then Dot assigned herself the task of selling the free chair. No joke, she sat out in it for almost an hour hollering "chair sale," only pausing every now and then to come in and tell us that no one was buying it.

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I told her to be patient. Someone would want it. It's a good solid chair, after all.

Yes, I know I promised to recover it.

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Yes, I know I bought all the fabric and recovered the lower half and got frustrated when it showed stains the very next day so I shoved it into the corner of my front room for months like a hideous unwanted flea-bitten something-or-other. Be proud of me, though, I finally got rid of it. I think I just needed to wait for the perfect time to give it away.

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The perfect time was this Thursday.

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Thursday was when a family happened to be walking down the sidewalk and saw my beautiful chair just begging for a new home, with fabric to boot.

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Thursday was when I offered to deliver it to their doorstep while they were out running errands.

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Thursday was when we pulled up to drop off the chair and found Dot's scooter sitting in their front yard. You know, the one we got her for her birthday that the bearings went bad on the back wheels so we replaced them with pink wheels after we etched our name and phone number into the frame in case it ever got lost or stolen.

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Yup, you heard it. Dot's scooter, 5 blocks down, with our name and number half sanded off and a new name scratched into the underside.

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I totally threw it into the back of the truck and took it home.

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And then Dot wrote them a scathing note telling them off that we let her tape to their front door. (keep in mind that while she knows her letters, her handwriting still looks like ocean waves)

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That, my friends, is why it's good to be generous with your old crap that you don't want anymore. Well, that and I didn't want to pay to take it to the dump.