Storage

My husband, Kory, can fix or build anything just using materials he has lying around.  I often refer to him as “MacGyver,” the character on TV years ago that seemed like he was able to build nuclear bombs out of bubble gum and paperclips.  It’s like that with Kory.

When Kaleb was a year old and Christmas was approaching, Kory went down to his workshop in the basement and whipped up one of the coolest rocking horses I’ve seen.  He used lumber he’d rescued from another project, made the saddle out of an old tool belt, and frayed the mane and tail from rope that was lying around.  It’s a work of art. 

Our bathroom now has a marble floor because Kory rescued those heavy slabs from the dumpster years ago on a job he was working in downtown Seattle. 

Kaleb now has a cool zip line using cables Kory was given after he helped reroof the Kingdome.

Kory also built Kaleb a pretty cool two-story playhouse, fashioned after a Norwegian “stabbur” (storage shed), with trees he’d scrounged from windfall.  Same thing with the log cabin style bed he made for Kaleb for his second Christmas.

This is the upside of Kory’s special “gift.”  The downside, of course, is storage.  That man won’t part with a thing if he thinks it will come in handy someday. 

If there’s ever an argument in our house, it usually revolves around storage.  I have the closets upstairs packed to the rafters with holiday decorations, crafts, photo albums and what-not’s, but if I dare bring a box of anything down to the basement, all the love my husband feels for me gets lost in the panic that arises in him that I might be infringing on some of his storage space.

I point out that he not only has the basement, but the entire double car garage, which we had to build an addition on to just for lawn care items because they wouldn’t fit in the garage.  I also remind him that he has the whole shed we built, and it’s lean-to, where we were supposed to stack firewood, but now is full of larger pieces of building material he doesn’t want to get wet.  Then we had to rainproof under the deck so he could slide lumber under there because he ran out of space in the garage and shed.  It never ends with him and his lumber hoarding.  But I try not to complain, because he actually does use the materials, and he is a very handy guy to have around.

Kory is very pleased with himself when he can build something that costs him nothing.  He gets a good laugh out of the whole “green” movement where we’re supposed to reduce, reuse, recycle.  It’s now politically correct to do what he’s been doing his entire life.  The difference is he doesn’t do it to be politically correct, he does it because he’s cheap and he won’t part with a buck.