Box O’Crap

 

Fifteen years ago today. That was the day we moved into our house. I’ll never forget that day. Up until then we had always been renters. When you rent, if something breaks, you call the landlord and they are obligated to fix it.

“Yeah, but you don’t own anything.”

We had gotten everything unloaded from the truck and into the house. Maybe about a quarter of the unpacking was finished and I pushed the switch to close the garage door. I was almost to the top of the steps when I heard a loud banging sound coming from the garage. One of the springs on the door had snapped. One day, one repair needed.

I guess it could have been worse. The spring could have snapped when I was still in the garage and killed me. That was the bright side people tried to paint for me anyway.

The second day, I was in the downstairs bathroom when my wife was in the shower. That’s when I noticed the water leaking through the ceiling. Remember, this is day two. I’m thinking,

“What have I gotten myself into and why wasn’t I in the garage when the spring snapped?”

Ok, the spring was just a matter of bad timing. The shower however was something the former owners had hidden from us. They must’ve done a quick fix and then bathed at the Y while we were going through the closing.

It was a few months before anything else went wrong. That’s when I accidentally bumped into the toilet and it started leaking…Ok, I slipped and fell out of the shower and banged into it. The only reason I’m telling you this is because my wife would leave it in the comments anyway.

Turns out, the toilet had been superglued to stop the leaks temporarily. Any slight touch was going to get the leak started, not to mention a full grown man violently falling and slamming into it.

All of these things have since been repaired, not to mention a lot of other things.

“Yeah, but you don’t own anything.”

One thing is bothering me. There’s a box in our garage that’s never been unpacked. It was something we brought here, put in the garage and never bothered with for all these years. In fact, it’s been longer.

When we moved back from California, the original intention was to stay with my parents until we could find a house we wanted. After a few weeks with them, we realized if we didn’t move out soon, our next residence would be an insane asylum.

So we decided to rent for a while as we were house hunting. When our furniture and boxes arrived from California, we unpacked everything except for one box. We put that into a storage closet we had at the apartment. Then when we moved in here, we brought the box and put it in the garage. So, it’s been over sixteen years since we’ve looked inside.

Chances are good I’m not going to open it and say,

“Hey look, here’s a million dollars we didn’t know we had.

Or,

“Here’s that Rembrandt we’ve been looking for.”

I’m thinking it’s time to throw it out with the trash. Just have to convince my pack-rat wife there’s nothing we really need in there. If we did it wouldn’t have been sitting there for all these years.

Hey, maybe I don’t have to throw it out. We can do this like storage wars and sell it to the highest bidder. Who wants to take a chance on finding buried treasures in my garage? Let’s start the bidding at thirty dollars.

You can send your bids through the comments section. Who knows what riches are buried inside this box. Could be the chipmunk I saw run into the garage three years ago and I never saw him run back out.

“Do I hear forty?”